The book of essays and short stories in the style of the detective thriller «Cemetery Stories» is composed of six independent chapters, each of which is devoted to one of the most famous and mysterious cemeteries in the world:
Don cemetery (Moscow)
Highgate Cemetery (London)
Pere Lachaise Cemetery (Paris)
Green Wood Cemetery (New York)
Foreign Cemetery (Yokohama)
Cemetery of the Patriarchs on the Mount of Olives (Jerusalem)
Each of the chapters, in turn, is subdivided into two fragments, dissimilar in style and genre: a documentary essay-essay, whose author should be considered Grigory Chkhartishvili, and a fictional detective story, written by Boris Akunin’s «hand». Thus, the book is, as it were, the fruit of collective creativity, equal co-authorship of two writers — real and fictional.
«… I wrote this book for a long time, one or two pieces a year. This is not such a topic to fuss, and then there was a feeling that this is not just a book, but a certain path that I need to go, and then it is useless to jump — you can skip a turn and get lost from the road Sometimes I felt that it was time to stop, wait for the next signal, calling on.
This road turned out to be as long as five years. It started from the wall of the old Moscow cemetery and took me very, very far. During this time, a lot has changed, «and myself, subject to the general law, I have changed» — I split into two for the reason Grigory Chkhartishvili and the entertainer Boris Akunin, so that the book was completed by two of us: the first was engaged in essay fragments, the second in fiction. I also found out that I am a tafofil, a «cemetery lover» — it turns out that there is such an exotic hobby in the world (and some have mania). But I can be called tafofil only conditionally — I did not collect cemeteries and graves, I was interested in the Mystery of Past Time: where does it go and what happens to the people who inhabited it? .. «
© B. Akunin
© & ℗ LLC Empire of Sound 2006
© & ℗ SP Vorobiev V.A. V.A.
© & ℗ ID SOYUZ
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