The Akunin Project is a compelling collection focusing on the work of Grigory Chkhartishvili—Boris Akunin, a bestselling contemporary Russian author of retro-mysteries, historical fiction, popular historiography, and much else. The co-editors, Elena Baraban and Stephen Norris, conclude their introduction with an unconventional (for an academic compendium) invitation: “Enjoy!” The volume delivers on its promise: it is accessible and even playful, as if mimicking Akunin's signature reader appeal (one example is Norris’ ingenious imitation of an instruction manual in his article). The volume is in equal measures informative and carefully structured. It offers generous coverage of Akunin's prolific output, addressing his multiple authorial avatars. Scholarly contributions draw on an array of critical methodologies, incorporate ample references to previous scholarship, and provide historical information to contextualize Akunin's work. Additionally, there are interviews with the author and excerpts from his untranslated works.

The volume has six sections of two chapters each. Part One examines the writer's first and most popular Fandorin franchise. As Baraban convincingly demonstrates, besides the postmodern effect of irony and playfulness, Akunin's references to historical facts and literature create a commentary about the fate of the talented individual in Russia. Drawing on a Homeric subtext, Akunin shows that “Russia has no heroes like Homer's Achilles” (46). Judith Kalb, likewise, examines Akunin's Homeric subtexts (therefore cross-referencing these two essays would have been helpful). Part Two moves to Akunin's second and third detective series, the adventures of Sister Pelagiya and of Fandorin's grandson Nicholas. Claire Whitehead updates her fine reading of the Pelagiya trilogy as postmodernist metaphysical detective fiction, in which the reader's quest for meaning (mimicking a detective searching to solve a crime) is continuously frustrated, while Zara M. Torlone interprets F.M. as an alternative version of Crime and Punishment. Part Three contains Elizabeth Richmond-Garza's engrossing comparative study of Akunin, Akira Kurosawa, and Eugene Sue. Here the Fandorin texts evoke Sue's frenetisme, “making possible subversive interventions in moments of cultural strain and hegemonic consolidation, even to the point of showing that detectives themselves… consistently err in their interpretations” (137). Similarly, Akunin adapts the Rashomon-effect, “an instance of multiple conflicting accounts of the same event that cannot be resolved to find a single truth” (152). The conclusion—like Whitehead's—is that Akunin's texts reveal not a fundamental truth but postmodern layers of deferred meaning. For his part, Norris examines Akunin's entertaining vision of history as one dominated by spies, conspiracies, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

Where the first three parts primarily focus on “mysteries,” Part Four switches to “histories,” namely, the sprawling History of the Russian State. Both Ilya Gerasimov and Norris assume a skeptical stance. In the former's view, Akunin “has offered nothing new and has only driven ad absurdum key elements of the Karamzinian worldview” (185). Norris sees the series as “fairly tame and, by Akunin's standards, fairly boring” (194). The penultimate section looks at Akunin's work under pen names Anatoly Brusnikin and Akunin-Chkhartishvili. In Yekaterina Severts's reading, Brusnikin draws on the practice of stiob (a form of unstable irony that could be read as support, ridicule, or a mixture of the two). Baraban reads The Family Album as Chkhartishvili's more serious engagement with the catastrophes of twentieth-century Russia. Finally, Part Six analyzes the reasoning and strategies behind the Akunin project. As Bradley Gorski engagingly argues, Akunin has helped “make success into an acceptable, and even prominent, conceptual category through which authors in post-Soviet Russia can understand and perform their own place in the literary world” (256). In closing, Natalia Erlenkamp analyzes Akunin's cross-media marketing strategies such as his homepage, blog, public marketing events, adaptations, and advertising.

One line of investigation relevant to the Akunin project that I found largely unexplored here is a critique of his literary-commercial enterprise. In fact, the editors point to this approach in the introduction: “This type of postmodernism lends itself to analysis in the framework of Frederic Jameson's critique of popular culture as ‘surrendering to the market’” (13). Yet the contributors tend to view Akunin's commercialism in a predominantly positive light. One wonders if F.M. is indeed “significantly more captivating… in terms of its plot and character development than Crime and Punishment” (126), or whether the new post-Soviet (libertarian) dream is one in which “positive actions are always rewarded” (269). The flipside of the Akunin phenomenon—as success-oriented and successful as it proved to be—is the dictate of the market and the establishment of a new middling norm justified by commerce-driven interests. Consideration of this issue would have enriched the collection.

Apart from this, the volume richly explores the Akunin phenomenon, and is to be recommended to anyone interested in contemporary Russian literature and culture.