The project of Boris Akunin - an example of literary strategy at the turn of XX-XXI centuries

This work deals with the literaturary project "B. Akunin", which was defined by it's creator G. Chkhartishvili as a "quality literature for the mass reader". When they wish to characterise the project, critics emphasize the use of an adventure plot combined with interesting style and intertextual play. We see a tendency to place the project in the "middle level", which in their hierarchy is somewhere between the literature created for the "happy few" and consumer fiction. However convergence of mass and elite culture is too general a trend in postmodernist literary strategy to be sufficiently characteristic of a concrete author. Our research covers all the texts published to the present day under the names of both G. Chkhartishvili and B. Akunin. It was the part of the extratextual strategy of the author to construct an image of himself as a writer of serious, almost scientific prose, who began to write detective stories for his own and his readers' enjoyment. The author generally uses mass clichés whenever he describes his heroes and action scenes in the story. He uses a great many simple references to the other literaturary works in his texts which should be understandable by every reader. At the same time we find other, more complicated references requiring knowledge of a wider literary "encyclopedia"...