ABSTRACT
With the relaxation of censorship restrictions under perestroika, cheap foreign literature – largely, romance novels, detective fiction, and pornography – flooded the Russian market, while the traditional Russian literary field appeared to fragment and Soviet high culture to collapse, leading Karen Stepanian to ask on the pages of the thick journal Znamia, “Do we need literature?” (Stepanian 1990: 222).1 This struck at the very heart of the identity of Russians, “the most readerly people,” whose “high” literature had served for almost two centuries as society’s moral compass and as a source of enormous cultural capital. Then, in 1998, in the chaotic final years of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, Boris Akunin burst onto the Russian literary scene and very soon his detective fiction was outselling that of the reigning “queen” of the genre, Aleksandra Marinina. Between 1998 and 2004, he sold over eight million copies of his books, and the tenth volume in the Fandorin series, Almaznaia kolesnitsa [The Diamond Chariot] (2003), sold out its first printing of 200,000 in a week. The final book in the series, Nefritovye chetki [The Jade Rosary] (2006), a collection of short stories about Erast Fandorin’s adventures in the nineteenth century, had a print run of 500,000 copies – a record for post-Soviet Russia.
