Caught Red-Handed? The Russian Fingerprint in Crime Writing

Crime Fiction in Other Climes 

Part II

I grew up in an era when the Soviet Union was, effectively, the Big Bad Wolf to what we like to call the 'West'. Of course, since I was in India, Russia was Big Brother and not in an Orwellian sense. Many Indians of my time are bound to feel a deep sense of gratitude to the USSR because it fed our brains without bleeding us. 

Where the US was busy foisting rotten wheat and sleazy fiction on us, the USSR sent us informative books of academic value. It engaged our youthful years charmingly with the most endearing works for children. Aesthetic and with fairly flawless though quaint English, these works had their role in producing a certain level of cultured Indian. This balanced the more lavishly available diet of mind numbing filth that was flooding our markets from the 'West'.

It is interesting to note that, in the Soviet Union, as in Mussolini's Italy, crime fiction did not thrive because the State wanted it to be assumed that there was no crime.

Thus, one of Russia’s most successful modern crime fiction writers today, Boris Akunin is predictably keen to dismiss such past, stressing that crime fiction in the USSR existed only in “embryonic form”[1]. “In Soviet times having a crime take place in literature was simply unthinkable, for how,” he asks, “could there be a crime in the land of triumphant socialism?”

internationalcrimefiction.org 

Yes, but unlike the case with Italy, for contemporary Russia, one name does pop up - Boris Akunin. If there are others, they have not yet provided grist to the Google mill.

Boris Akunin by Dmitry Smirnov from Moscow, Russia, via Wikimedia Commons

There is a well written and engaging piece on him on the Washington Post where we learn that Boris Akunin is an alias, that the author has a high level of engagement with Japanese crime fiction, that he is reclusive and that he, like some others that we have seen, likes to project himself into his creations. 

From the horse's mouth:

"What I am doing, and still trying to do, is change the position of an author in Russian literature," Akunin said. "Here in Russia, due to certain peculiarities of our historical development, a writer has always been bigger than a writer, literature has always been bigger than literature. A writer was supposed to be a philosopher or an economist, a political thinker, whatever. I am an entertainer."

washingtonpost.com

Around 2006, we have his first translated novel hitting US shelves. Now, it seems as if clues click into place - the author is part Jew. And, thus, slides easily into the comfort zone of readers used to the combined heavy burden of European collective guilt over, openly, the Holocaust and, more covertly, over similar actions that were taking place in pre-war Europe, such as pogroms - and these existed, whether by another name, or nameless. So, Solzhenitsyn's anti-Soviet writing is mainly remembered for its condemnation of the way Jews were treated in the Soviet Union. Many factors influence any one thing in this universe! Nabokov, too, has such a card up his sleeve - his wife and, more importantly, his sympathies. 

Where literature is bent to suit specific interests as decided by one section or another, it loses its force. Today, more than ever, it is business interests that orchestrate what we get to read or not. What is important is awareness - this act of consciousness not only enhances the pleasures of reading but also helps us address and resolve universal issues in a more mature way than our governments and sponsored academics can and do

Cherchez la filthy lucre apart, Boris Akunin is your man if you want to embark on Russian crime fiction today. And, oops, he seems to have also earned his right to be translated into English, published in the English translation and to surface in Google searches because of factors discussed above. Of course, that does not detract from anything. We should have the adult capacity to observe and to remain non-reactive. We are not, after all, earthworms.

Feel free to preview an Akunin below:

Though there exist TV serials and films of his novels, there is nothing that I can find with English subtitles. Alas!

Browsing another excellent site about the genre in that region, we find a "queen of the Russian modern detektiv mystery". Sadly, I can find no English translation of any novel of hers on amazon.in. The link is a great resource and lists a nicely curated set of Russian crime novelists. More pertinently, this is where I learned of an anthology that sounds tempting:

Browsing the amazon 'reviews' I find one person bringing up the issue of translation in a manner that leads back to thoughts I've expressed in a previous post: is translatability into English a key factor deciding which book is brought to us from elsewhere?

For me that raises another question: What constitutes a translation for the public at large? In my experience, people prefer dubbed films, for example, to those with subtitles. So, is 'accent' a problem, then, in writing, as well? We would rather not hear the 'alien' language in a film. We choose the version where the characters speak our language. Is this not like those who go on package tours to exotic destinations where the package includes 'home food' for the traveler? If this is true, then how do we ever get to experience the world at large as it exists for itself rather than as a curio fashioned by our own craftsmen representative of our fantasy of that place.

With these thoughts I was about to take leave of you when Sergey Kuznetsov swam into view. I was about to consign him to the horror genre when I found that he has authored a detective trilogy - The Nineties: A Fairy Tale.

In closing, find here an extract from his Butterfly Skin.