LONDON — Hundreds of Russians packed a London auditorium in May to hear Boris Akunin, the author of a popular detective series, tell them that, regarding the war in Ukraine, “the actions of the Russian military are criminal.”
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Akunin’s series, set in the last days of tsarism, made him rich and famous, but, recently, statements like that have made him more infamous in Russia. The Kremlin has just branded him a “terrorist” and in effect vetoed his works.
When President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Akunin wrote on Facebook: “Russia is ruled by a psychologically disturbed dictator and, worst of all, he obediently follows his paranoia.”
The author began to contemplate how cultural figures who flee abroad could continue to reach their local audiences. Being isolated from his own readers gave urgency to the project.
“The amount of work I have been doing during those two terrible years, I have never written so much in my life”he commented to the public.
One of his editors estimated that Akunin had sold at least 30 million books in Russia. His around 90 works include novels, plays and a history of the Russian state, and have been translated into more than 40 languages.
However, his standing in Russia’s literary world crumbled in December after two pro-Kremlin pranksters phoned him, posing as Ukrainian officials. He told them that attacking Russia militarily was justified in times of war and talked about raising money for Ukrainian refugees.
Akunin, a longtime Kremlin critic, left Russia in 2014 to protest its illegal annexation of Crimea. But the broadcast of the prank call was a critical moment. Russian authorities called him a “foreign agent” after adding him to a list of “terrorists and extremists.”
In February, a Moscow district court ordered his arrest in absentia. The distribution of his books in Russia practically ceased. Akunin, 68, admitted to feeling bitter about the blocking of his sales to Russian readers, both at home and abroad, because Western online stores reject Russian credit cards.
Boris Akunin is a pseudonym. Akunin means “villain” in Japanese; Mikhail Bakunin was a prominent Russian anarchist of the 19th century.
Baptized Grigory Chkhartishvili in Georgia, he grew up in Moscow, where his mother’s family were fervent communists. He studied Japanese history at Moscow State University, then worked at a prestigious literary magazine. He gained a reputation for his scholarly Russian translations of works in Japanese or English.
In the late ’90s, he wrote his first crime novel in just six weeks. Published in 1998 as “Azazel” in Russian and translated into English as “The Winter Queen,” it featured a detective named Erast Fandorin. More books followed, which inspired films and television series.
“I think he did great things for Russian literature — he built and invented the Russian mystery novel,” said Galina Yuzefovich, a Russian literary critic.
After 15 Fandorin books, Akunin is done with the character.
In May, it launched an online platform where writers, musicians and other artists could stream their work, charging a small fee.. He expanded the sales portal for his books to include other authors banned in Russia. After it refused to stop selling “The Inheritance,” a novel by Vladimir Sorokin, who also lives in exile, the page was blocked in Russia in June.
“I have never written so much in my life.”
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