It feels like it wasn’t that long ago that I wrote about the final book in Boris Akunin’s nine-volume epic on the history of the Russian state — and yet here the author is launching a new cycle, which will apparently offer a different perspective on the same subject matter.
Not so long ago, Akunin wrote that he began the Russia-history cycle partly to understand how the country ended up in its current condition. And already by the third volume he had found his answer and continued to follow that line throughout the entire series (which is noticeable — though at times it feels as if he’s forcing the pieces to fit).
But why, then, did he start a new cycle, titled Illumination of History — and starting essentially from the same point as the previous one? In principle, the answer is already hinted at in the title of this first book: Remarkable People of Ancient Rus’. While narrating the history of the state, the author naturally highlighted the key players of that history. But he felt that he had not gone deep enough into them.
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