Becoming an overnight sensation in Russia is not common. But Grigory Chkhartishvili — pen name, Boris Akunin (Akunin means evil in Japanese) — has hit the top.
Akunin has only been writing novels for the past five years, but they have all led Russian best-seller lists, and translations of his books are available in German, French and Japanese. In addition, TV and movie deals are brewing.
He has completed 15 books so far, but his first to be published in the United States is "The Winter Queen," a crime novel whose hero is young Erast Fandorin, a 19th century gentleman-sleuth. Akunin's next three books, "Leviathan," "The Turkish Gambit" and "The Death of Achilles," will all be published in the next four years by Random House.
His novels are being translated into English by Andrew Bromfield, but Akunin speaks fluent English. During a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., Akunin, who is 47, said that not even Russians can pronounce his real name, hence his use of a pen name.
Originally, Akunin was a philologist ("someone who plays with words"), and he earned his living translating Japanese literature into Russian, and writing a book he still considers his magnum opus, "Writers and Suicide."
The combination of a mid-life crisis, and his wife's complaint that Russian popular crime novels had covers too garish to carry on the Moscow subway, drove Akunin to try his hand at the genre. "The first ones (including 'The Winter Queen') took only six weeks each to write, but now they take much longer. My latest book took a half-year to write, and the one I'm doing now, about graveyards, will take about 10 months."
The reason he is taking more time, Akunin said, is that he is competing with himself. "I keep aiming higher."
Anyone tempted to think that the new king of Russian literature writes in a formulaic style will be surprised. "None of the novels I've written are alike. I change everything from one book to another. It is true the boom in my books in Russia happened in a very short period, but word of mouth started slowly. My publisher was small, and it was the only way it could work. Then, suddenly my fifth book came off with a bang."
Akunin attributes his success partly to the political changes in Russia over the past decade. "A whole new class — the middle class — emerged in Russia in the 1990s. It needed its own literature, ideology, entertainment — everything. I was willing to produce easy reading."
As a translator himself, Akunin would seem a difficult author to please, but he is satisfied with Bromfield's translation. "I think it's pretty good. I picked him from among many translators. I thought Bromfield was just the right one who could produce this pseudo-Victorian style, which is the style in the Russian text as well. I made only a few corrections."
When asked if his writing style could be called "tongue-in-cheek," Akunin said, "if you want — but most Russian readers take it just as adventure. The humor is very subtle. If someone is killed, I don't mean it as a joke. What Russian readers like is not knowing what to expect. I write in a collage of styles taken from different classical writers, such as Dostoyevski ("Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment") Robert Louis Stevenson ("Treasure Island") and others. I zigzag between them, and I use hidden quotations. This detective (Fandorin) has nothing to do with whodunit."
Akunin says he "stole" Amalia Bezhetskaya, the stunningly beautiful Cleopatra woman, "a classical femme fatale so evident in the 19th century and on movie screens now, from Dostoyevski. He has a character exactly like her — and the main character in his book is struck by a photograph of the beautiful woman, just as in my book."
To create Erast Fandorin, Akunin said, "I took a few characters from Russian literature that I admire, then added something of my own, mixed them up and stirred until he became alive. He is not the center of action in all the novels, though. In the second novel, there is a female lead. The third has five narrators, none of them Fandorin."
Akunin enjoys the writing process. "I have a gusto, what you would say is an appetite for writing. But I don't want to overdo it, because it would not be pleasure if I worked too hard. I spend about three to four hours a day writing. But when I write, I write quickly. I start with characters. I make a list and try to guess each character's life story. I have to know all about him.
"It is what we call in Russia, the Stanislavsky system. Stanislavsky was the director of the Moscow Art Theater — he would make his actors actively create the characters they were playing and get inside their world. The plot is a magnetic current, moving and changing course. The story develops itself and I listen, carefully."
Above all, Akunin enjoys "fooling the reader. That amuses me greatly. My fifth Fandorin book, 'Special Missions' starts out being picaresque and funny — then, when the reader shows me his unprotected soft belly, it becomes the story of Jack the Ripper coming to Moscow —and it is very bloody."
E-MAIL: dennis@desnews.com