Graveyard Tales

A collection of essays and novellas in the detective-thriller style of “Tales from the Cemetery” consists of six independent chapters, each devoted to one of the world’s best-known and most mysterious cemeteries:

Donskoy Cemetery (Moscow)

Highgate Cemetery (London)

Père Lachaise Cemetery (Paris)

Green-Wood Cemetery (New York)

Foreign Cemetery (Yokohama)

Patriarchs Cemetery on Mount of Olives (Jerusalem)

Each chapter, in turn, is divided into two fragments of different style and genre: a documentary essay—whose author you should consider to be Grigory Chkhartishvili—and a fictional detective novella written “in the hands of” Boris Akunin. Thus, the book presents itself as the product of collective creativity—equal co-authorship by two writers: the real one and the invented one.

“...I wrote this book for a long time—one or two pieces per year. It wasn’t the kind of topic to fuss over. And besides, I had the feeling that it wasn’t just a book, but a certain path I had to go through, and hopping along with a run wasn’t right—one could overshoot the turn and get off the road. Sometimes I felt it was time to stop, wait for the next signal that would call me further.

This road turned out to be a full five years. It began at the wall of an old Moscow cemetery and took me very, very far. During that time, many things changed, and “as if bound by the general law, I changed too”— splitting into Grigory Chkhartishvili the commentator and Boris Akunin the showman, so the book was being completed by two of them: the first worked on essay-like fragments, and the second on fictional prose. I also learned that I’m a taphophile— a “cemetery lover.” Apparently, such an exotic hobby exists (and for some, even a mania). But calling me a taphophile is only conditional: I didn’t collect cemeteries and graves. What interested me was the Mystery of the Past: where does it go and what happens to the people who lived in it?”

© B. Akunin

©&℗ Ltd. Empire of Sound 2006

©&℗ Individual entrepreneur Vorobyov V.A. V.A.

©&℗ Publishing house SOUZ