An Unusual Bestseller: Notes on the Structure of B. Akunin’s “Leviathan”

Abstract

An Unusual Bestseller: Notes on the Structure of B. Akunin’s “Leviathan”

The most characteristic feature of Russian culture nowadays is a new syncretism that tries to combine very different and even opposing approaches, based on interaction between the socalled “mass culture” and “élite art”. The aim and purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, through an analysis of Boris Akunin’s “Leviathan”, that the main narrative strategy of this detective novel consists in the search for those poetic devices that can be easily comprehensible to different social/cultural groups. In this perspective, we hope to show that in order to evaluate the ways in which contemporary Russian Literature is developing, it is necessary, first of all, to admit its polyphonic nature.