Boris Akunin

19 -25 February 2026

by Boris Akunin

Source: Facebook

19 February 2026

I’ve been time-traveling through newspaper archives since early morning, looking through issues for a specific date but from different years. Starting with 1962 (which I can remember). The feeling I experienced is best conveyed by the line: ‘What can I say of life? That it’s been long’. 

During my early childhood, in the early 1960s, the newspapers assured us that heaven on earth would be built in the USSR by 1980. Dear Nikita Sergeevich, First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, gave his solemn promise. ‘The present generation of Soviet people is going to live under communism!’ I recalled how in the new year of 1963, in kindergarten, we drew this communism: monorail lines over Moscow, apple trees on Mars. In Mandelstam (not that Mandelstam) Park, a statue of Stalin toppled from its pediment lay about on the ground and we played on it. But 1980 was the unimaginably distant future.

And also, a memory. I’m standing, a school kid, on New Year’s Eve day, at a bus stop. In front of me are two elderly ladies (I now think they were about 40). One says to the other, ‘Lord, it’s crazy, this is 1970 coming, not 1940!’ 1980 was still very far off, but by this time they were no longer promising communism. On the other hand, they had started showing a wise Stalin in the movies. ‘I won’t trade a soldier for field marshals’. I remember the intellectuals’ distress in this regard. 

And once, many many years later, I saw on the Eiffel Tower the lit-up number 888—the number of days left until the new century. I remember thinking, Mon Dieu, am I really going to see the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY? At the time, Stalin had been considered tossed out on the dust-heap of history.

And now, as of 1 January, the middle of the twenty-first century is already here. There’s no heaven on earth, and no one is promising one. Apple trees aren’t in bloom on Mars. Volgograd wants to go back to being called Stalingrad. Bears are rubbing against the axis, and the Earth keeps turning.

Source: Facebook

20 February 

What a loss. 

Nikolai Komyagin and Shortparis—my main musical discovery of the 2020s. Especially this song 

Oh, my sorrow
where I have never been
who has seen tomorrow,
who has seen the end?
who do you belong to, 
only ashes now are you

Source: Facebook

22 February 2026

No one is indifferent to America. Some passionately love it; some passionately don’t. And there’s good reason to love it passionately and not. There was a time when I, for example, loved it because the TV show Vremya and the magazine Krokodil didn’t. 

Now the nastiness it has there, too, has crept, oozed out of America. And taken on a physical guise. Trump, of course, is the true ‘Americaphobe’s dream’. The kind of clichéd Yankee such as used to be depicted in caricatures in that same Krokodil. Loud, rude, boastful.

‘I was extremely brave!’ ‘I’m an extremely stable genius!’ ‘I’m very highly educated!’ 

In the 2020s, first Russia’s good name fell into disrepute (okay, it had never been especially attractive, but there was still Tolstoevsky, the Nutcracker, and Gagarin). Now, America, too, is barreling in the same direction. The former was a tragedy for me; but the latter is breaking my heart, too.

America, America, God shed His grace on thee, we were taught so long to love your forbidden fruits… 

We need to create a new movement right away: MADA: Make America Decent Again.

Source: Facebook

25 February 2026

To learn the news about myself from the Homeland—their trials against me, what they hate me for at the given moment, what they’re sentencing me to—about once a week I do a search on a news aggregator, and if nothing turns up, I go my merry way.

But today I saw that my name is again being actively invoked. 

A couple of days ago, Sergei Stepashin (who I know nothing about) said somewhere there that Akunin and Bykov aren’t going to return to Russia, of course—they’ve been handed a sentence. ‘But the rest—why shouldn’t they come?’ the good Stepashin said.

The Russian press is actively discussing this genial notion. An article about this even came out with an informative statistic: ‘Today there are 904 people on the list of foreign agents, 43 of whom are journalists and another 33 represent the cultural sphere… But that’s not even the main thing: right now the investigative organs have more than 100 criminal cases in progress against people with this status’.

Indeed. Why not come?

Source: Facebook

Translated by Marian Schwartz