A champion for the bourgeoisie: reinventing virtue and citizenship in Boris Akunin's novels

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Leon Aron

IN ASSESSING Fandorin's challenge to the intelligentsia tradition of political and social change, one cannot wish for a better witness than the writer whose name became an adjective virtually inseparable from the Russian intelligentsia. By coincidence or design, Fandorin's life and career unfolded alongside that of Chekhov.

The heart of Chekhov's discord with the intelligentsia was the same as that which animated Vekhi: he seemed to believe that the path to a happier life ran not so much (or even primarily) through external change but through the fashioning of one's own way of honorable living in the world and following it daily. "When you turn around your life, everything will change", Sasha tells Nadia Shumina in the novella Nevesta ("Bride"). "The most important thing is to turn around one's life, everything else is not important." Chekhov considered decent and productive life by individual men and women immeasurably more important for Russia's progress than the future idyll brought about by state reforms. In a letter, he wrote "I believe in individuals. I see [Russia's] salvation in individual persons."

With modernist self-consciousness suffusing Chkhartishvili's texts, it is hardly a coincidence that Fandorin's history, his habits and even his appearance seem to be modeled on Chekhov. Fandorin, like Chekhov, is sent into the world with no connections and no money and makes himself by an intense and successful deployment of willpower at the daily bettering of oneself. A son of a bankrupt shopkeeper from Taganrog who supported his family by writing stories between studying for medical school exams and attending hospital rounds, Chekhov knew firsthand the price of such effort: "incessant daily and nightly labor, constant reading ... [and] willpower." In this work, Chekhov wrote, "every hour was precious" and was not to be wasted.

Fandorin's temperament, too, is unmistakably that of an Anton Chekhov: neither optimist nor pessimist, but a pragmatic skeptic wary of grandiose social projects and believing in a few self-made and self-policed rules of honorable living. Chkhartishvili's hero daily practices the four virtues that Chekhov seemed to consider Russia's only hope: decency, dignity, competence and hard work.

Fandorin loves his work, performs it brilliantly; he treats others according to their abilities and effort, not rank. Amid corruption, Fandorin repeatedly refuses bribes. Where rulers and ruled alike disregard laws, he is scrupulously law-abiding. Surrounded by vulgarity, he shows a refined taste.

Above all Fandorin valued individual liberty as much as did Chekhov. "There is nothing I love so much as personal freedom", Chekhov told his close friend and publisher Alexei Suvorin.

In an 1889 letter, which thus anticipated Vekhi by two decades, Chekhov makes clear (by his own and his father's life stories) that the freedom he so treasured was the product of a backbreaking and sustained personal effort to rid himself of qualities incompatible with those of the free man. His was a story of