From a Long Line of Orphans
As the protagonist of a mystery or thriller, Nicholas (Nika) Fandorin is a bundle of inadequacies: he’s too trusting, and at two meters tall with his constant Western smile he stands out like a sore thumb. He’s basically a lovable, ineffectual doofus, the sort of character one might imagine headlining at most a freestanding murder mystery. Anyone can stumble into a crime scene once, after all, and there are plenty of Russian mysteries whose innocent protagonists get caught up in a web of intrigue like Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock movie (Polina Dashkova excels at that sort of thing). But as the anchor for an entire series?
As we get to know Nika, however, his role becomes more interesting, and his very inappropriateness proves to be part of the charm. Nika’s strengths are in his inherent contradictions: Russian, but British; a historian, but barely; eventually a private investigator, but basically unemployed, and, most fundamentally, an orphan with an impressive pedigree.
This last point is a strong connection to his grandfather, Erast Petrovich; indeed, Nika comes from a long line of orphans, a statement that sounds paradoxical until you think about it. In the natural (or preferable) order of things, everyone is orphaned eventually. In Nika’s case, his status allows him to be the conduit for a great deal of information about his family tree, while still granting him that privileged status of the traditional adventure hero (the fatherless and motherless striver). The lack of parents is what so often allows the hero to set off on his quest, and this is certainly true in Nika’s case. His father was so hostile to post-Revolutionary Russia that he would never have approved of his son’s journey.
As a Russian visiting the motherland for the first time, Nika enacts a familiar post-Soviet trope. 1990s mass culture couldn’t get enough of stories of foreigners coming to Russia and being totally incapable of handling Russian reality, including tales of returned emigres coping with culture shock. The film Amerikansii dedushka features an old man whose years in the United States have left him so naive he doesn’t even recognize a prostitute when he sees one (a situation that plays itself out here in Chapter 1, which ends by quoting an angry child prostitute’s response to Nika’s admonishments that she should be in school, “Fuck you, mister!”) This is the sort of naiveté that facilitates a particular Russian pride in Russian particularity, such as when Nika eventually puts his carefully-studied lexicon of Russian obscenities to practical use. The stranger looks laughable, and the things that he doesn’t understand, many of which might be considered unpleasant in a different context, become a source of good-natured humor, tinged with a bit of a sense of superiority over the idiot foreigner who can’t quite figure things out.
For Nika, coming to Russia is a failed exercise in time travel. His father had instilled in him a reverence for the Russia We Have Lost, while also doing his best to represent twentieth-century Russia into a nightmare land to be avoided at all cost. Nika can’t actually go back in time, so he can only travel in space, but at least he goes by train rather than airplane. Between his amateur historical passion and the books’ narrative structure (alternating chapters between the 1990s and 1682, Akunin gets as close as possible to moving his hero back and forth through history, short of introducing an actual time machine (he’ll eventually give in to temptation and send Nika’s son back in time in Detskaia kniga, but that is, quite literally, another story). Even his actual trip to Russia seems untimely: “In just a few years Russia had managed to finally be in fashion and fall out of it immediately.”
Sir Alexander had managed to keep the Russian language preserved, as though it were trapped in amber (I am providing the quotes here in Russian, since the status of Russian is precisely the point) : “В отличие от отца, подчеркнуто не интересовавшегося московскими вестями и до сих пор говорившего «аэроплан» и «жалованье» вместо «самолет» и «зарплата»,” while his son spent his days filling page after page of a notebook with an obsessively nerdy catalogue of contemporary Russian slang: “отстойный музон = скверная музыка («отстой» вероят., близкое к «sewage»); как скрысятить цитрон = как украсть миллион («скрысятить» – близкое к to rat, «цитрон» – смысловая подмена сл. «лимон», омонимич. имитации сл. «миллион»)”
As a combination of the learned and the foolish, Nika proves to be an ideal protagonist, not for a mystery, but for a tale of (displaced) homecoming. Having lost his parents and failing to make real headway in academia, he is at a crossroads. Or, as the narrator puts it, he is “недоделаный”—not quite formed yet. Post-Soviet Russia will be his crucible. And maybe, just maybe, when Nika truly grows up, he could leave his obsession with his family history behind, or at least temper it enough to pay attention to a family of his own. Nika arrives in Russia with half of a document, and his search for the other half is the engine of this particular mystery. But it is also an obvious symbol: can he find the rest of himself? Or maybe just his better half?
Some Observations:
Though Nika is as much a Fandorin fanboy as the most passionate of Akunin’s readers, the irony is that he, the historian of his family, cannot help but know much less than we do. Thus the first chapter is full of Easter eggs, such as the fact that Nika’s grandmother left behind a set of jade rosary beads of unknown provenance. We know that Erast Petrovich took these beads with him wherever he went. But Nika is most likely doomed to ignorance.
Allegory alert: Nika is traveling from Western Europe to post-Soviet Russia on a train called “Ivan the Terrible.”
By the end of the chapter, our hero suffers a fate so common to crime reports about foreign visitors as to be something of a cliche: his train compartment is gassed, he falls unconscious, and all his possessions are stolen (including his laptop and his precious document).