Metaphysics of a detective story (on the novel of Boris Akunin “The Sennight of the Three-Eyed”)

Abstract

The paper studies the new novel by Boris Akunin “The Sennight of the Three-Eyed” as a mul-ti-interpretative text. The object under consideration is (quasi) detective and other pretexts of the novel. The subject analysed is intertextual allusions to the texts of A. Conan Doyle, U. Eco, V. Nabokov, M. Bulgakov, F. Dostoevsky, and also the self-intertextual allusions. They help Akunin to change a narration genre dominant (a historical novel, a detective story, a spy story, a love story), which turns into hagiography in the last chapter of the novel. The paper aims at analysing the intertextual and self-intertextual allusions of the novel so as to represent the Akunin’s philosophy of history. One more re-interpretation of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by Conan Doyle allows Akunin to show the 17th century Moscow through the eyes of “the old-Muscovite Sherlock Holmes.” The composition of the novel is a transformation of “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco: seven days correspond to seven chapters, but in the Akunin’s novel, the days do not follow each other, and the number “seven” has a different symbolic meaning. As in the “Conclusive Evidence” by V. Nabokov, the Time in the fiction world of Akunin moves in a spiral. It allows the main characters to get out of “the vicious circle” of two Russian Times of Troubles in the last chapter of the novel, where the characters find harmonic integrity when Markel “the Three-Eyed” returns to the original topos of the novel – the Unburnt Monastery.