The Russian Gambit: Boris Akunin Chooses His Own Adventure

• In Event: Procedural Transgression: The Emancipatory Potential or Failure of Ludic Media

Abstract

This paper connects the structure of Boris Akunin's latest project, the app-based novel Soulagine, with the wistful historical revisionism the author has practiced since he debuted his Erast Fandorin series of detective novels in the late 1990s. Akunin's explorations of pre-revolutionary Russian politics attempt to recuperate the Soviet century by stipulating the possibility of avoiding it altogether: perhaps, with the intervention of the right historical actors — namely, a hyper-moral James Bond-Sherlock Holmes hybrid — it would have been possible to avert the calamity of the Bolshevik Revolution. Of course, the longer the series goes on, the more intense the impression of the Revolution's ultimate inevitability. Soulagine (2016) uses the features of app-based entertainment to take a simultaneously distantiated and interactive approach to the question of changing history's course. A neologism deriving from the French soulager, to palliate, the work's title refers to an amnesia-causing pill that the protagonist takes to cope with the pain of a terminal disease. At select points in the narrative, readers have the opportunity to "choose their own adventure," propelling the plot in whatever direction most appeals to them. Shortly after its release, Akunin revealed on his blog that the app was a social experiment testing how many users would prefer a "syrupy love plot" over a philosophical meditation on the nature of love and death. By encouraging his readers to become "prosumers" fully in control of their own entertainment destiny, Akunin finds a novel way to fulfill the traditionally pedagogical function of the Russian littérateur.

Author

• Maya Vinokour, New York U