Boris Akunin's Reading List

"There was a real murder in Moscow in 1865, two elderly women killed by axe. Dostoyevsky was deeply moved by this crime. When a writer is deeply moved, he writes a novel. When it is a great writer, the story turns out to be a great novel. Crime and Punishment is on my list because I wrote my own version of the events. In a novel called F.M. (Dostoyevsky’s initials, Fyodor Mikhailovich) I introduce a newly discovered manuscript by Dostoevsky, a first version of Crime and Punishmen t, and it is a 100% mystery about a serial killer. The novel F.M. is a double mystery. On level 1, in modernity, it describes a chase for a newly discovered version of Crime and Punishmen t, a manuscript written by the great writer himself. It would cost many millions if sold at an auction. We can read the manuscript chapter by chapter as they are found one after another, and this is Level 2, where the events of the classical novel take an unexpected turn. Raskolnikov is a suspect there, but the story is much more complicated."

"Now, The Brothers Karamazov is a real detective novel, a very rare phenomenon for 19th-century Russian fiction. We have a mysterious murder here, we have several suspects, we have a courtroom investigation, and we do not know eventually, not for sure, who is the culprit. Yes, The Brothers Karamazov is very long-winded. No one reads the novel as a suspense. It is a study of the human soul’s complexity, a tale about the magic and curse of passion, a clash between Mind and Heart. It is a detective story, but a strange one."

"This was a young writer’s attempt to write a financially successful thriller. The protagonist (and the narrator) is a court official investigating a murder of a young woman. It is a crime of passion, that much is evident, but there are several suspects, one of them is arrested and convicted. In the end, it turns out that the murder was committed by the investigator himself, so the novel might have been Agatha Christie’s inspiration for The Murder of Roger Akroyd . Dame Agatha did the job much better of course. As a mystery author, Chekhov is hopeless: too slow, easily distracted, and more interested in the mystery of soul. The Duel is my favourite. It is so clinically honest about humans, so bitter, so cold – and at the same time so kind, humane, full of understanding and forgiveness that it scratches your heart."

"Many would argue that Chekhov’s play The Seagull is not a crime story because the main character shoots himself (we are told in the last scene). Well, my theory is that Chekhov did not understand what really happened there. Konstantin had absolutely no motive for suicide, hence he was murdered. By one of the other characters. So this is a classical hermetic whodunit. I wrote a play (again) called “ The Real) Seagull where I investigate what could have happened there. Once, when I was speaking at the philology faculty of Moscow University, a professor asked me how dared I mock the great Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. (That was before I mocked Dostoyevsky, wrote my version of Hamlet and committed other similar sacrilegies. Chekhov was my first blood). I said that a work of classics is alive only as long as it encourages readers to challenge it and to argue with it. If not, it’s just history of literature. Respected but boring. Like the Illiad ."

"I started the Erast Fandorin series, my first fiction project, after a long reflection on how to become rich and famous without hard work, having fun. I was 40, I was bored with my profession of literary editor and critic. The only skill I possessed was playing with words and ideas. My favourite pastime was computer games. I combined it all and made a living out of it. Boris Akunin (who was born Grigory Chkhartishvili in Soviet Georgia and lives in exile in London) is at the Oxford Literary Festival on Monday 18 March 2024 at 6pm, as part of its new annual Programme of Georgian Literature and Culture , founded and directed by writer and critic Maya Jaggi."