Erast Fandorin - Allusions and References To Other Works

Allusions and References To Other Works

According to Akunin, he mixed several of the most sympathetic heroes of Russian literature to form the Erast Fandorin character. One of these heroes is Chatsky from Alexander Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, from whom Fandorin inherits his sense of duty: "To serve the cause, not the individuals". Other heroes Erast Fandorin is based upon are Andrei Bolkonski (from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace), Prince Myshkin (from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot) and Pechorin (from Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time).

Akunin said he "plots along the line of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day". The orphaned urchin Senka, the narrator of He Lover of Death, is clearly based upon Oliver Twist (also pointed out by the subtitle of that novel: a Dickensian story). The entire first volume of The Diamond Chariot is an allusion to Alexander Kuprin's Junior Captain Rybnikov, and the opening sentence of The Winter Queen is a clear reference to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. A more subtle allusion exists to Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, as the novel The Winter Queen starts with a suicide in 1876, exactly the same year in which Anna throws herself under a train. Another allusion to Anna Karenina can be found in The Jack of Spades, where Fandorin's current girlfriend, who is married to another man, has the same patronymic (Arkadievna) as Anna Karenina herself. In Murder on the Leviathan, one of the newspaper fragments is signed by G. du Roy, an allusion to the journalist Georges Duroy from Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami.

In The Death of Achilles the hired killer Achimas is mentioned as having been secretly hired by the Italian government to kill an anarchist nicknamed "The Jackal" who plans to kill King Umberto - yet Achimas himself bears considerable similarity to the hired killer nicknamed "The Jackal" who plans to kill Charles de Gaulle in Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of the Jackal". Furthermore, Achimas' lifestory mirrors that of the Iliad's Achilles and the events described in the second part of the novel allude to Homer's work.