Hundreds of Russians packed an auditorium in central London on a recent warm evening to listen as Boris Akunin, the author of a wildly popular detective series, told them that when it came to the Ukraine war, “I believe that the actions of the Russian Army are criminal.”
Mr. Akunin’s series, set in late czarist times, made him rich and famous, but outspoken statements like that one have made him more infamous of late back home in Russia. The Kremlin recently labeled the author — who went into self-imposed exile in London a decade ago — a “terrorist” and effectively banned his works.
When President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Akunin wrote on Facebook, “Russia is ruled by a psychologically deranged dictator and worst of all, it obediently follows his paranoia.” At that time, he began contemplating how cultural figures fleeing abroad might still reach their domestic audience and perhaps help to spur change at home. Being cut off from his own readers lent the project special urgency.
“I have to say, the amount of work and writing I’ve been doing over these two terrible years, never in my life have I written so much,” he told the audience members, who laughed when he said that a writing binge trumped a drinking binge. “It is a form of escapism.”
Mr. Akunin, 68, was not exactly a slacker before the war. One of his Russian publishers estimated that he had sold at least 30 million books in Russia. His roughly 90 works include novels, plays and an extended history of the Russian state. Various writings have been translated into more than 40 languages.
His position in Russia’s literary world crumbled last December, however, after two pro-Kremlin pranksters phoned him, pretending to be senior Ukrainian officials. He told them that attacking Russia militarily was justified in wartime, and mentioned raising money for Ukrainian refugees.
Mr. Akunin, long a vocal Kremlin critic, left Russia in 2014 to protest the country’s illegal annexation of Crimea. But the broadcast of the prank call proved to be a tipping point with the Russian authorities, even after Mr. Akunin denied their accusation that he had donated money to the Ukrainian military.
“I don’t want to take part in anything that is to kill my compatriots, even if they are wrong,” he told the London audience.
The Russian government labeled him a “foreign agent,” after adding him to a list of “terrorists and extremists.” Criminal investigators raided one of his publishers, interrogating employees and impounding thousands of his books. In February, a Moscow district court ordered him arrested in absentia.
He remains sanguine about his own safety, but widespread distribution of his books in Russia essentially ended lest the businesses involved be accused of spreading “extremist” material. One of Russia’s largest publishers and several major bookstore chains halted sales.
In a lengthy interview in London, Mr. Akunin, who has a bald pate, a white beard and an impish twinkle behind oval, gold-rimmed glasses, admitted to feeling bitter about the blocking of his sales to Russian readers, both at home and because overseas, Western stores online reject Russian credit cards. But he tried to make light of the situation. “I am going to get a lot of new fans,” he said, imagining a horde of Russian criminal investigators hunting for signs of extremism in his books.
Boris Akunin is a pen name, reflecting his wide-ranging interests in language and history. Akunin is the Japanese word for “villain”; Mikhail Bakunin was a leading 19th-century Russian anarchist.
Born Grigory Chkhartishvili in Georgia, he grew up in Moscow, where his mother’s family were ardent Communists. As a boy, he once complained to his grandmother that he disliked porridge, and she told him: “You don’t have to like porridge, you have to eat it. You have to like Lenin and the Communist Party.”
Transfixed as a teenager by samurai rituals, he studied Japanese history at Moscow State University, then worked at a prestigious literary journal. He gained a reputation for erudite Russian translations of works in Japanese or English.
In the late 1990s, he banged out his first detective novel in only six weeks. The manuscript was stylish, written in impeccable Russian, and had an intriguing plot, recalled Irina Bogat, whose publishing company, Zakharov, then a new imprint, took the book.
The work, published in 1998 as “Azazel” in Russian and later translated into English as “The Winter Queen,” featured a swashbuckling detective named Erast Fandorin. But booksellers found the name weird. Nobody wanted the book.
Two years passed, with two more Fandorin books, when sales suddenly exploded amid an effort by a cult following to divine the real name of the author, Ms. Bogat said. Print runs mushroomed after the books inspired at least six films or television series.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a comic television actor before his political career, even used the Fandorin character in one silly pastiche.
“I was around 40 at the time, so instead of finding a new wife, I found a new profession, because I sort of like my wife,” Mr. Akunin said. He and his wife, Erika, have been a couple for more than 40 years.
The books were “amazing for the epoch,” said Galina Yuzefovich, a well-known Russian literary critic. “There had been no mainstream literature, written with the idea of entertaining the growing urban middle class,” she said. “I think he did great things for Russian literature — building, inventing the Russian mystery novel, a new type.”
The Fandorin books are mostly set in Russia’s Silver Age, starting in the late 19th century, a period of artistic and political ferment.
Fandorin is often called the Russian Sherlock Holmes. He “is like a national superhero, and we didn’t really have any,” Tim Kojevnikov, 26, a U.S.-educated businessman who left Russia when he was 12, said at the London lecture.
Mr. Akunin did provoke the occasional critic. Aleksei Tarkhanov, a Russian cultural journalist, called him “the Ikea of Russian literature” — elevated design but low quality. “He allowed the ‘intelligent reader’ to read trash and not be tormented by remorse, because his pulp fiction is demonstratively literary,” Mr. Tarkhanov wrote.
After 15 Fandorin books, Mr. Akunin is done with the character, he said. His newer novels are denser, gloomier, more philosophical — and far less popular. “They are typical difficult Russian novels where you read and you sweat and you recite and you cry,” he said.
His most ambitious project has been a 10-volume history of the Russian state, each written with a companion historical novel.
Mr. Akunin’s lecture, on May 9, coincided with the release of the latest volume, “The Destruction and Resurrection of the Empire,” about the Lenin and Stalin years. His basic thesis is that Russia has considered centralized empire-building to be something sacred since the 15th century. The Ukraine war is Mr. Putin’s striving to do it again, he said.
In Moscow, Mr. Akunin would labor on one book at his kitchen table, writing others in different bedrooms. In exile, he follows the same routine, but on a grander scale. He writes history in London; serious nonfiction amid the gloomy weather of northern France; and lighter fare at a third home in southern Spain.
He compares the widening gulf between Russians at home and abroad to two groups standing on an iceberg that is slowly cleaving in two, with some people leaping across a divide that will eventually yawn too wide.
In May, he introduced an online platform where writers, filmmakers, theater directors, musicians and other artists could stream their work, charging viewers a small fee. He also expanded the website for selling his books to include many other authors banned in Russia. After he refused to stop selling “Heritage,” a new novel by the best-selling author Vladimir Sorokin, also living in exile, the site was blocked in Russia in late June.
In the 1970s, Russians hankering for icons of Western culture like bluejeans, Coca-Cola and the Beatles helped to undermine the Soviet Union. So Mr. Akunin hopes that a vibrant Russian culture abroad might develop similar appeal as domestic artistic freedom withers.
Some critics find that idea overly optimistic, both because Russians at home often think the diaspora disdains them and because repression has not deadened all artistic expression.
For the inauguration of his cultural platform, Mr. Akunin used images generated using A.I. to create a manga-like comic adapted from a Nikolai Gogol story. “Classical Russian literature is the best way to escape from classical Russian dictatorship,” he said.
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from London, and Milana Mazaeva from New York.
