“But There Is No East and Also No West”: Overcoming National Barriers in Akunin’s Way

Abstract

This article analyses Boris Akunin’s writing concept of national identity and the possibility or impossibility of overcoming cross-national non-communication. The analysis is based on Akunin’s texts of different genres (the Erast Fandorin’s Adventures project, Tales from All Over the World, and Russian Man in England, a self-study book on fiction). It is noted that the “solution of the national question” during the thirty years of the writer’s work in literature has undergone certain changes. The authors demonstrate that in the Fandorin project, Boris Akunin focuses on modelling and describing three barriers that exist in the perception and evaluation of the unfamiliar (the barrier of a foreign language, the barrier of a foreign way of life, and the barrier of foreign mentality). In Tales from All Over the World, the writer takes a different perspective of understanding the national complex. He is interested in the correlation between the national and the universal. This book is about the fact that national identity is nothing but a variant of an invariant, it comprehends universal values in a national arrangement. The self-study book on fiction Russian Man in England can be read as Akunin’s final reflections on the possibility or impossibility of cross-national understanding. The analysis of this work demonstrates that it is a book of professional and national self-identification at the same time. Akunin does not simplify the possibilities of interethnic dialogue. According to the writer’s concept, it is necessary not to adapt to a different national way of life, but to understand it. Only then does the formula “they are like me” begin to “work” realising itself extremely rarely and always incompletely. An attempt to understand a different mentality presupposes a whole complex of personal qualities, which is based on the ability for dialogue, analytics, intellectuality, cultural baggage and, most importantly, humanity.