Boris Akunin "All the world's a stage"

These days I have plenty of free time, so read books like some machine - one by one. In several days finished reading detective novel by Russian writer Boris Akunin which title is the same as William Shakespeare's aphorism "All the world`s a stage". Akunin is fantastically popular in Russia today as brilliant novelist. But few people knows that first he started as Japanese literature researcher and translator and published his works by his actual name Boris Chkhartishvili (he is actually Georgian) and it is Chkhartishvili who finally translated maybe all most famous novels by Yukio Mishima and introduced them to Russian readers.

Boris Akunin (in Japanese his pen name means "villain") became famous for his historical crime novels. He has some novel series but the most famous is novels with Erast Fandorin as main hero. Fandorin is 19th century Russian detective and he is hero of this novel also.

In childhood i liked Agatha Christie and each novel by her was so thrilling for me - I used to switch off light in bedroom, turn the small lamp and read her stories till morning... She is master of crime literature for me and I think she made some kind of "intermediate" mass literature - yes, it is still "light" fiction for mas , but at the same time it is very clever, smart literature, language, story-telling techniques are sort of "pure literature".

So, Akunin made the same in Russian crime literature. Before him we had classic traditional literature, post-modernism literature "not for all" and "dime novels" which sold with cigarettes and chips...

Akunin novels are very stylish. Their language is language of 19th century literature. We can find a lot of allusions to classic Russian literature - to Chekhov, Tolstoy.. When you read them, you feel like you watch very beautiful album with colourful reproductions of 19th century Russia. And in his late novels there are also lot of "Japanese" theme (his hero speaks Japanese and spent some time in Japan).

Last year Boris Akunin received award from Japanese government for his contribution in spreading Japanese culture in Russia - and we also had program featured him.

This novel was very intriguing as all his novels are (sometimes too much melodramatic though). One by one admirers of famous theater actress Eliza Altairskaya are being killed and Erast Fandorin decided to investigate this matter, but he also fell in love with actress. So you find here mixture of historical novel, crime novel and "love affair" story... One more gem of this novel is play script which Fandorin wrote as present for main heroine - he wrote in Kabuki play-style and this play, published in Appendix after main novel, is truly another bright Akunin stylization work.