2024-03-29T08:41:27Zhttps://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/oai/requestoai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/125132023-04-25T23:35:26Zcom_10023_111com_10023_29com_10023_879com_10023_878col_10023_112col_10023_880
2018-01-19T00:30:44Z
urn:hdl:10023/12513
The temptation of the reader : the search for meaning in Boris Akunin's Pelagia Trilogy
Whitehead, Claire Eugenie
University of St Andrews. Russian
Novels
Setting
Literary criticism
Narratives
Narrators
Intertextuality
Literary postmodernism
Caves
Crime fiction
Detective fiction
PG Slavic, Baltic, Albanian languages and literature
BDC
R2C
SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
This article discusses the games that Boris Akunin's Pelagia trilogy (2000–03) plays with the reader's attempts at interpretation and meaning-making. Most critics agree that detective fiction in this ‘whodunnit’ mode is a genre that invites the active participation of its reader in order to uncover a hidden truth. What Akunin's trilogy does, however, is simultaneously to invite this participation and playfully frustrate it by thwarting or disrupting the reader's various attempts at solving its puzzles. This article considers the ludic elements of Akunin's trilogy in three different, though related, interpretive spheres: historical reference; intertextual and metatextual reference; and the search for faith. It concludes that the Pelagia trilogy is best viewed as an example of postmodernist metaphysical detective fiction, which poses provocative questions about the nature of knowledge, the status of meaning, as well as the act of reading.
2018-01-19T00:30:44Z
2018-01-19T00:30:44Z
2016-01-01
2018-01-18
Journal article
Whitehead , C E 2016 , ' The temptation of the reader : the search for meaning in Boris Akunin's Pelagia Trilogy ' , Slavonic and East European Review , vol. 94 , no. 1 , pp. 29-56 . https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.94.1.0029
0037-6795
PURE: 15508286
PURE UUID: 04842b8b-d065-4f1b-8818-e37d1e2479ac
Scopus: 84962068654
ORCID: /0000-0003-3712-2223/work/51943784
WOS: 000368252800002
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/12513
https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.94.1.0029
eng
Slavonic and East European Review
© MHRA 2015. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. Originally published in The Slavonic and East European Review, published by Modern Humanities Research Association. The final published version can be found here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.94.1.0029
oai:research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk:10023/34852023-04-25T23:33:59Zcom_10023_111com_10023_29com_10023_879com_10023_878col_10023_112col_10023_880
2013-04-17T16:31:02Z
urn:hdl:10023/3485
The Letter of the law : literacy and orality in S. A. Panov's Murder in Medveditsa Village
Whitehead, Claire Eugenie
University of St Andrews. Russian
PG Slavic, Baltic, Albanian languages and literature
SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
This article takes as its subject a nineteenth-century detective story: S.A. Panov’s Murder in Medveditsa Village (1872). Panov’s work is remarkable amongst its contemporaries for the way in which it interrogates the relative authority of the written and the spoken word in the criminal investigation and, in so doing, foregrounds the role and status that detective fiction assigns to language. The aim of the present article is to discuss the ambiguously nuanced illustration Panov provides of the relative power of written, spoken and non-verbal language in the particular context of the functioning of the law and the pursuit of the ‘truth’, two cornerstones of detective fiction. Language, and especially the written word, is thus shown to play the decisive role in structuring the various networks of authority operating in and around the fictional world.
2013-04-17T16:31:02Z
2013-04-17T16:31:02Z
2011-01
Journal article
Whitehead , C E 2011 , ' The Letter of the law : literacy and orality in S. A. Panov's Murder in Medveditsa Village ' , Slavonic and East European Review , vol. 89 , no. 1 , pp. 1-28 .
0037-6795
PURE: 457942
PURE UUID: 198a0aa3-c5fa-4f42-93b7-c2585f31f5ca
standrews_research_output: 31327
Scopus: 79952825350
ORCID: /0000-0003-3712-2223/work/51943788
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3485
http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79952825350&partnerID=8YFLogxK
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.89.1.0001
eng
Slavonic and East European Review
Copyright 2011 Claire Whitehead. Deposited by permission of the publisher.