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.
In the new book (or cycle?), he focuses only on the portraits of the key, standout figures of the chosen era. The narrative is split into two parts: first comes a brief historical overview of the selected character, along with Akunin’s own assessment of that person’s personality and actions; then follows a short fictional vignette from that character’s life. The story is imagined — an attempt to show the individual within the historical reality of the time. There are no facts to support such interpretation, but nothing rules it out either. After all, that’s how most historical novels are written; some have very little to do with reality at all (just look at the real-life biography of the historical d’Artagnan, for example).
It’s too early to judge how interesting the entire cycle will be. The first book turned out quite good, especially if you last read about these same figures several years ago. But “good” specifically as a collection of short sketches. They don’t give you a full picture — more like reading a concise article, a bit like a Wikipedia entry, but written in a lively, engaging style. And then you also get a little fictional “tale” about the character on top of that.
Still, compared with the first cycle, this book feels quite secondary to me. First, Akunin has already written a lot about these figures in the main series, so part of the information naturally repeats. Second, short biographical sketches don’t allow you to see the full picture — a historical figure is always a reflection of their world and its realities; they don’t exist in a vacuum.
The fictional inserts are interesting, but they break the flow a bit, and on their own they don’t have enough time to pull you into the setting, since they are precisely brief vignettes. There can’t be any fully developed conflict or deep emotional involvement by design. For the same reason, I wasn’t all that taken with another of Akunin’s books built on a similar principle — Cemetery Stories.
But since I enjoy reading about historical figures, I’ll pick up the next book as well (if the author continues) — and we’ll see from there.
My rating: 4/5
