With the release of the novel As He Was Leaving, He Asked, Boris Akunin has fully completed his historical cycle, in which he simultaneously told the history of the Russian state and accompanied it with works of fiction set in the corresponding historical period.
Boris Akunin concluded the history of the Russian Empire with the reign of the last tsar of the Romanov dynasty — Nicholas II. Beyond that point, in the author’s view, it was no longer the history of an empire (though recent events show that imperial history seems unwilling to let Russia go).
The fictional cycle, as I have written many times before, is essentially the story of a completely different dynasty, one that managed to traverse the entire path from the Varangian era to the Revolution of 1917. And if in the earlier works of the cycle representatives of this dynasty played a rather prominent role — sometimes even stepping directly into the spotlight (as in the novel The Fortunate Adventures and Reflections of Lucius Catin) — then in the penultimate The Road to Kitezh it was the events of the era that came to the fore, rather than one of the heirs with the telltale birthmark on the forehead. The final novel, titled As He Was Leaving, He Asked, is likewise far less focused on the last heiress of the family in the cycle.
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