The Nika Fandorin Novels: An Introduction
Just two years after launching his series of novels about Erast Fandorin, Boris Akunin turned his attention to Fandorin’s grandson, Nicholas (Nika). In those two years, Akunin had already published seven novels about Erast Petrovich, along with the first book in the Pelagia trilogy. He clearly wasn’t running out of material. So why bring in a new Fandorin?
The obvious answer is that the Nika series forced Akunin to write about the present day directly, without recourse to suggestive historical parallels. But Russia had no shortage of mystery novels and thrillers set in the post-Soviet era; after all, Akunin’s growing domination of the bestseller list meant that his books were challenging those of the reigning queen of Russian mysteries, Alexandra Marinina.
Marinina’s series about militia analyst Nastya Kamenskaya was particularly adept at turning the stuff of everyday post-Soviet life into fodder for murder mysteries. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the frequency of her publication, along with her insistence on having her heroine age in real time, meant that the Kamensaya novels served as a reliable chronicle of the ups and downs of Yetlsin- and Putin-ea life (Nasya’s apartment remodeling, begun around 1997, ends up frozen after the 1998 economic crash). Why would Akunin challenge Marinina on her own turf?
As it turns out, he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. Though the present-day setting meant he could talk about then-current Russia directly, Akunin chose a protagonist (a failed scholar turned amateur historian) whose own obsession with the Fandorin family lineage becomes an excuse for a much more detailed reproduction of Russia’s historical past. Each of the four Nika Fandorin novels alternates chapters between present-day Moscow and a much earlier moment in the history of both Russia and the Fandorin family. In the case of Altyn-Tolobas, that means that the novel will be about two parallel discoveries of Russia by two parallel Fandorin’s: Nika, arriving his historical homeland for the very first time in the year 2000, and his ancestor Cornelius van Dorn, who comes to Muscovy in 1682.
Thus the Nika Fandorin series is something of a hat trick; Akunin investigates present-day Russia, supplies hints about the later life of his most popular hero, and manages to dive even deeper into historical Fandoriana than any of the Erast novels could ever allow him. As we shall see, Nika is many things, and serves many functions, but one of his primary attributes is that he is obsessed with his family history. Like Akunin’s readers, he simply can’t get enough of stories about his most famous ancestor, Erast Petrovich. He put the “fan” in “Fandorin.”
In that respect, the move to the present day is a sleight-of-hand, since Nika’s main role is to serve as an excuse for detours into the historical past. You might come to the Nika novels to see what happens to Erast Petrovich’s descendants, but you stay to learn more about this ancestors.
Still, the joke is on Nika, for two reasons. First, we, as readers, are privy to much more information about long-ago Fandorin’s than our present-day hero ever will be, thanks to the magic of fictional narrative. Second, and more important: Nika is a terrible historian.
We learn early on that Nika’s career isn’t going anywhere. His professors don’t have a great deal of confidence in him, and his best hope for making a name for himself is investigating his own genealogy. In academia, this is far from promising, and Akunin should be credited for not asking the reader to take this very seriously as a career prospect. [1] In a later novel, Nika has used the fruits of his scholarly labor to create a video game about his family history, a game he plays when he should be working. Nika’s approach to the study of history is a lot like a young adolescent’s approach to the study of sex: it’s best done when he’s alone in his room.
NIka’s inadequacy as a historian is reflected in the title Akunin gives to his series, a title whose near-untranslatability may well be the point. In Russian, the series sounds impressive: “Prikliucheniia magistra”, and would be equally impressive in English if we could use a false cognate, “The Adventures of a Magister” or “The Adventure of a Master.” But what it really means is, “The Adventures of an M.A.” As someone who teaches in a Master’s program, I mean no offense to my hard-working students, but, let’s face it, “The Adventures of an M.A.” doesn’t sound all that impressive. Given Nika’s stalled career, a better title might be “The Adventures of an A.B.D.,” but that suggests that the books will be an academic farce, which they are not.
Yet there is another possible title, based on a looser translation. This title would fit with both NIka’s subsequent career and the recent radical change in the life of Erast Fandorin, just a year before Altyn-Tolobas was published. At the end of The State Counsellor, Fandorin leaves the government service rather than compromise his own honor, after which he becomes both a consultant and a private investigator. Nika, too, becomes a private investigator, although not a particularly successful one, and this is one of the many things that makes him stand out from his Russian literary competitors (Russian mysteries tend to be solved by Russian police detectives). Unlike Erast Petrovich, though, Nika has no real qualifications for this new job. Which is why I suggest an alternative English series title: “The Adventures of an Amateur.”
Amateurism is what gives Nika most of his charm, especially in the hands of a writer like Akunin, who is nothing if not professional. Bradley Gorski quite convincingly argues that one of Akunin’s main contributions to Russian literature is a palatable image of success; when it comes to Erast Fandorin, this is absolutely correct. But Nika is another matter. More like the hero of the Russian folk tale, who haplessly stumbles into adventure and needs all manner of magical helpers to save the day, Nika’s charm is that he is always just a small step away from complete failure.
Note
[1] Here he does better than Keith Gessen, in his otherwise wonderful novel, A Terrible Country, where we are supposed to believe that Slavists would be interested in the stories his grandmother tells him, that Slavic Review would quickly publish an article based on his interactions with a contemporary Moscow anarchist group, and that this would be enough to secure an otherwise unpromising, newly-minted PhD a tenure-track job.