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

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Leon Aron

   a young man, the son of a serf, a former
   shopkeeper, a chorister, a schoolboy and a
   university student, brought up on reverence
   for rank, on kissing priests' hands, on veneration
   of other people's thoughts, thankful for
   every crust of bread, flogged many times ...
   who lied to God and people, lied without
   need, simply out of the realization of being a
   nobody ... this young man is squeezing drop
   by drop the slave out of himself, and wakes
   up one fine morning and feels that it was real
   human blood flowing in his veins, not a
   slave's. (5)

A Hero for Contemporary Russia

FOR ALMOST two centuries Russian literature has anticipated and powerfully illuminated discontinuities and transformations in the nation's values and aspirations well ahead of its rulers, officials, social scientists and even its secret policemen. There are tantalizing hints in the phenomenal success of the Fandorin cycle as well.

Could millions of Russians have spent their hard-earned rubles to buy more than a clever plot, elegant style and engaging hero? Might not have they also found in the book's existential credo a usable guide to forging their way through the onrush of modernity and freedom of choice, to charting their lives amid the ruins of erstwhile moral, economic and political certainties?

Fandorin's ideals may be precisely what is required in Russia today, where personal efforts (what used to be called the "small deeds" in Chekhov's days) by millions are far more important than the feats of a few: work hard, be honest, do not take bribes, pay taxes, be creative, take risks, abide by laws and force others to do so. Most important, Fandorin's insistence on serving and assuming personal responsibility for his country is key to the emergence of a civil society, without which Russia will never become a liberal capitalist democracy.

Has Fandorin's goal of organizing the space closest to him been found consonant by the Russians responsible for the explosion of private charity, human rights groups, private funding for the arts, hundreds of new print and cyber media that spring up every year and thousands of voluntary associations? What might be called the privatization of Russian national goals is well underway. For the first time in Russian history, the very criteria of national greatness are concerned not with the glory and military might of the state but with the welfare of individual citizens. As Boris Yeltsin declared in a televised interview in mid-June 1997:

   A great power is not mountains of weapons
   and subjects with no fights. A great power is
   a self-reliant and talented people with initiative.
   In the foundation of our approach to the
   building of the Russian state ... is the understanding
   that the country begins with each of
   us. And the sole measure of the greatness of
   our Motherland is the extent to which each
   citizen of Russia is free, healthy, educated and
   happy.

Might not, then, the success of the Chkhartishvili's books signal the beginning of a tectonic and, for Russia, a most benign shift from the intelligentsia--which for over two centuries were bound to the state by employment and belief in etatist approaches to social change--to a self-supporting middle class?