A nun with a nose for adventure

BORIS AKUNIN, the pen name of Georgia-born Grigory Chkhartishvili, first known as an essayist and translator of Japanese literature into Russian, has achieved great popularity in Russia with mystery novels set in the late 19th century. That, of course, was the golden age of Russian prose. Readers can hear echoes of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov in whodunits that, because of their literary overtones, can be guiltlessly consumed as entertainment. A sign of the author’s playfulness is that akunin means “bad guy” in Japanese.

The first Akunin novels translated into English -- “The Winter Queen,” “The Turkish Gambit,” “Murder on the Leviathan” and “The Death of Achilles” -- follow a government clerk turned detective, Erast Fandorin, whose investigations take him from Moscow’s slums to a Balkan war then onboard the world’s biggest ocean liner.

His book “Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog” opens a new series centered on the physically clumsy but mentally acute nun of the title, who assists the Orthodox bishop of Zavolzhie, a remote province east of Moscow on the Volga River.

The bulldogs -- three of them -- are the pets of Marya Afanasievna Tatishcheva, the bishop’s widowed aunt and owner of a large estate. Someone is trying to kill the dogs, first with poison, then by cruder methods.

The motive seems to be to drive the old lady to her death, but because she changes her will every week, it’s uncertain who would benefit. The bishop, Mitrofanii, sends Pelagia to solve this seemingly minor mystery while he attends to what he fears is a threat to the whole civic order that he and the provincial governor have built up over two decades.

The trouble starts when an itinerant merchant and his son are found murdered, their heads cut off. This presents an opportunity for a high church official, Vladimir Lvovich Bubentsov, who arrives from St. Petersburg.

A former military officer noted for his dissoluteness, charm, cruelty and skill with a dueling pistol, Bubentsov whips up public animosity toward the Zyts, claiming they are reviving their primitive forest tribe’s bloody pagan rites of centuries past. He condemns the bishop’s tolerant policies and seizes most of the levers of power in Zavolzhie. More violence seems inevitable.

Akunin’s narrative method -- the story is told by an anonymous local resident who is baffled or in the know, with a limited or omniscient point of view, as suits the author’s purpose -- is reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s “The Devils.”

Again, we have a provincial town in ferment, a huge cast of characters, a display of extreme passions mixed with satire. In “Sister Pelagia,” Bubentsov is a reactionary, whereas Dostoevsky’s villains, Peter Verkhovensky and Nicholas Stavrogin, are revolutionaries. But their sins are identical: They care only for their ambitions, not for other people. They are akunin, which the author has defined in an earlier novel as people “who create their own rules.”

And this, in Mitrofanii’s eyes, makes them devils indeed. A whole chapter is devoted to the bishop’s advice to the governor on how to improve life in Russia through a kind of enlightened conservatism. Democracy isn’t essential, but human dignity is. Nobody should be flogged or left to starve. Corruption can’t be eliminated, but it can be curbed. Ruthless selfishness -- disguised by the politics of left or right -- can’t be allowed to get out of hand.

Here we come across another likely reason for Akunin’s popularity. Russian literature of the late 1800s is full of unease and foreboding, but modern Russian readers may well view that period as a historical sweet spot. The serfs had been freed; the horrors of the 20th century were a generation off, and possibly avoidable had the nation taken a different path -- if people like the bishop and Sister Pelagia had been running things.

Even Mitrofanii, no intellectual slouch, can’t keep up with the redoubtable nun, who knits, prays, swims the mighty Volga, connects the bulldog plot with the murders and disqualifies one likely suspect after another. Though genuinely pious, Pelagia has a secular past, which allows her, in the interests of her sleuthing, to disguise herself as a society flirt -- something she enjoys more than she feels is good for her. We can empathize.

Akunin serves up thwarted lovers, artistic rivalries, a police shootout, courtroom histrionics and much more, all with an infectious sense of fun that assures us (even though it’s also proof that “Sister Pelagia” is only a skillful pastiche of its literary antecedents) that a happy ending is on the way.

Michael Harris is a book critic and author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”