Best-Selling Russian Writer Turns From Crime to History

MOSCOW â€" Grigory Chkhartishvili, the best-selling Russian writer known for his detective novels set in imperial Russia (written under the name Boris Akunin), and for his foray into opposition politics directed against Vladimir V. Putin announced that from now on he would devote himself to writing a multivolume history of Russia.

“Some writers dream of becoming the new Tolstoy, others the new Chekhov,” he wrote on his blog on Wednesday. “It’s come time to acknowledge that I have always dreamt of becoming the new Karamzin,” he said, referring to Nikolai Karamzin, who wrote an early-19th-century 12-volume “History of the Russian State.” “I am no longer a crime novelist,” he declared.

Mr. Chkhartishvili, 56, originally a literary scholar specializing in Japan, said he had already written his first history volume, about the period preceding the 12th-century Mongol invasion. The works, he said, would be accompanied by historical novels paralleling their chronology that would trace a family’s history over a millennium. He said he aims for a mass readership with the history, and that Karamzin is a model because he also had a background as a fiction writer who didn’t want to bore readers.

History has become an increasingly tense topic in Russia. President Putin recently ordered that new ideologically approved history textbooks be produced for schools. Mr. Chkhartishvili wrote in his blog that Russians know very little about their own history and his work would be distinctly “non-ideological” in contrast to “current official efforts to produce a new ‘correct’ history.”