A summary of "Love of History" by Boris Akunin

This book is a collection of historical essays published in 2011. The author analyzes little-known archival facts, supplementing her texts with authentic commentary from online discussion participants. This work is the first book in the historical series of the same name, "Love of History." Other collections in this series were later published: "The Worst Villain," "The Real Princess," and "The Most Insufferable Detective."

Crime and the Police

The mundane murders of the nineteenth century lacked elegance. Newspaper accounts describe the spontaneous drunken strangulation of a random drinking buddy in Sokolniki. Young Alexander Carr hacked his mother and sisters to death with an axe for pocket money, ignoring the detectives’ suspicions about a fictitious beggar. Clerk Luka Shamov smashed his employers’ heads with an iron, orchestrating the scene with a surviving bloodied infant to deflect suspicion. The atrocities of the past are always crude and lacking in literary romance.

British police sergeant William Popeye lost his job for infiltrating a coal miners’ union disguised as an ordinary worker. London police chief Charles Warren refused to use undercover informants, demanding honest work under the strict rules of cricket. Honest methods of cleaning up society are slower, but they prevent systemic corruption in law enforcement.

Rulers and Loyalty

The Japanese shogun Tsunayoshi enacted harsh laws on animal compassion. Stray dogs were fed meat, and peasants starved. Informers reported cruelty, and entire villages were executed for killing packs of mischievous dogs. After the shogun’s death, the population happily exterminated the dogs. Cruel state practices undermine even the most humane intentions.

The loyalty of subjects is often temporary. Empress Josephine couldn’t leave her theater box to relieve herself. She resorted to a cashmere shawl. The devoted chamberlain, Count de Beaumont, reverently hid the wet cloth. Later, the footman Constant abandoned Napoleon after his fall, taking the treasury with him. Count de Beaumont quickly defected to the new government and voted for the execution of the Bonapartist Marshal Ney.

French King Louis XIV illegally sentenced Superintendent of Finance Nicolas Fouquet to life imprisonment. The treason charges turned out to be fabricated by Minister Colbert. The court sentenced the accused merely to exile, but the monarch unilaterally overturned the sentence. Fouquet remained in prison forever.

Death and heroism

The author names an old woman as the most terrifying murderer. Seventy-two-year-old Prudence Pezet, known as the She-Wolf, led a gang of robbers in the forests along the banks of the Somme. She cold-bloodedly slit the throat of a kind passerby and fearlessly ascended the scaffold, refusing the services of a priest.

Great people often die absurdly. King Pyrrhus, who defeated the Romans, was killed by a falling flowerpot. The famous detective Allan Pinkerton died of blood poisoning after accidentally biting his tongue. Playwright Tennessee Williams choked on an eyedrop cap, and writer Sherwood Anderson swallowed a toothpick from a cocktail.

The highest levels of heroism are demonstrated by the most ordinary people. The most decorated British soldier of World War I, William Coltman, was a sectarian and a staunch pacifist. He served as a medic, refused to bear arms on principle, and spent two days without sleep carrying wounded soldiers out of the line of enemy fire.

The defense of Balaklava in September 1854 has gone largely unnoticed by posterity. A hundred Russian soldiers and invalids, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Matvey Manto, with four cannons, heroically resisted the British army and squadron. A similar feat is recorded in the attic of the Mikhailovsky Ravelin in Sevastopol, where an inscription by unknown defenders remains on the wall: "There are three of us left… We die for the Motherland."

Female courage and beauty standards

The Russian language lacks a term to describe female courage. The Duchess of Berry forced the terrified Marshal Suchet to cut the umbilical cord of her newborn child in front of political observers. Empress Eugénie visited cholera barracks in Paris and Amiens without guards, shaking the hands of dying patients to end the public panic.

That same Empress Eugénie forever changed European beauty standards. Until the mid-nineteenth century, only plump women were considered attractive. The French ruler introduced the fashion for thinness and gauntness. In historical Japan, the criteria were different: beauties blackened their teeth with varnish, shaved their eyebrows, and prized clear skin without a single mole.

Dictators and partisans

Totalitarian rulers eliminate strong men in their entourage. Adolf Hitler’s entourage consisted of effeminate or corpulent party officials. Joseph Stalin exterminated stern revolutionaries, replacing them with seemingly soft-spoken officials. Only a brutal war briefly restored the stern-faced military to power.

Early Chekists seemed saintly to writers like Isaac Babel. Revolutionary asceticism and selflessness enabled the Bolsheviks to win the civil war. The pragmatic era arrived later, when the government abolished the party salary cap in 1932.

The Japanese character is characterized by a complete lack of proportion. The founders of the kamikaze units, Admirals Masafumi Arima, Matome Ugaki, and Takijiro Onishi, committed suicide after their defeat. They felt personal guilt toward the young pilots who perished.

Japanese soldiers continued fighting for decades after the official surrender. Corporal Shoichi Yokoi hid in the forests for twenty-seven years. Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda hid in the jungles of the Philippines for twenty-nine years, killing local civilians and only agreeing to lay down his arms to his former commander in 1974.

Adventurers and aristocrats

Aristocrats know how to survive in any circumstances. Baron de Lussatz began life as a homeless vagabond, ended up in a Paris prison, and then became a powerful crime boss. He later legalized his business in Monte Carlo, becoming a respected citizen.

The wealthy Russian princess Zinaida Yusupova bought her young French lover the titles of count and marquis. She built him the Château de Keriolet in Brittany. Decades later, her great-grandson, Felix Yusupov, won the building from the department of département, sold off all its historic interiors, and converted the devastated structure into a hotel.

General Boris Shteifon was half-Jewish. He had a successful career in the Tsarist army, fought for the White Guard, and during World War II commanded the Russian Security Corps in Yugoslavia. Shteifon rose to the rank of German lieutenant general and escaped the gallows, dying of natural causes in April 1945.

The French Marquis de Mores founded a town in North Dakota and fought against Chicago cattle ranchers. He later led anti-Semitic assault squads in Paris, killed political opponents in duels, and died in Africa at the hands of Tuareg sabers.

Women in men’s dress

In the eighteenth century, daring women successfully concealed their gender. Jeanne Baret disguised herself as a young man and set off on a circumnavigation of the globe with the botanist Philibert Commerson. In Tahiti, the natives recognized her as a woman by her scent. Jeanne brought back thirty crates of unique plants to France and received a life annuity from King Louis XVI.

Irishwoman Christian Davis joined the army to find her missing husband. She served as an infantryman and a Royal Dragoon for fifteen years. Christian fought in battle, drank rum, and fatally stabbed a sergeant in a duel. Her true gender was revealed only after she was seriously wounded in battle.

A Russian woman, Isabella Eberhardt, converted to Islam and traveled through Algeria dressed in Arab men’s clothing under the name Mahmoud Saadi. She joined a Sufi mystical order and became the first female war correspondent. Isabella drowned in the desert during a sudden flood, when a three-meter-high mudflow destroyed her home in the town of Ain Safra.

Time, Photography, and Duels

The author describes vintage photographs as a way to peer into the past. Shots of old Moscow appear deserted due to the long camera exposures. A daguerreotype from 1840 captured an elderly Constanze Mozart, linking the nineteenth century with the great composer’s distant era. Time is like twisted insulating tape, the layers of which are sometimes pierced by a stray memory. Thus, a Joan Baez concert in France transported the writer back to the atmosphere of the 1970s.

Duels didn’t disappear with the end of the nineteenth century. In 1926, French politicians dueled with swords right in the velodrome. In 1967, Marseille Mayor Gaston Deferre wounded MP René Ribière with a foil. The most exquisite duel took place in 1958 between choreographer Serge Lifar and the Marquis de Cuevas. The fight ended with a slight scratch and a touching embrace.

Obsession and patriotism

Dictator Gabriele D’Annunzio peacefully captured the city of Fiume. He ruled the independent republic for fifteen months. The population listened daily to his theatrical speeches from the palace balcony. Citizens held nightly torchlight processions, freely purchased cocaine, and dueled. Pirate attacks on cargo ships replenished the state budget.

French peasants in the village of Hautefay demonstrated a savage, cannibalistic patriotism in 1870. They mistook the peaceful municipal councilor Alain de Monais for a Prussian spy. A drunken mob beat him for two hours and then burned him at the stake. Some of the attackers tore at the victim’s charred flesh with their teeth.

Forgotten revolutionaries of Siberia sacrificed themselves to defend human dignity. At the Ust-Kara penal servitude camp, Nadezhda Sigida attempted to slap the commandant. She was brutally flogged. Six women voluntarily took poison in protest against corporal punishment. The Kara tragedy forced the government to change prison laws.

Answers to questions

The writer answers readers’ philosophical questions about life, literature, and the state. The intelligentsia is obligated to critically evaluate the work of government officials. The state in Russia has historically been perceived by the population as a hostile force, which gives rise to a natural, defensive thievery among citizens. The author considers tax reform and the accumulation of foreign currency reserves to be rare achievements of the modern government.

Love arises from a deep existential hunger. A person seeks a partner who will fill their inner emptiness. A successful union unites two lonely fragments into an inseparable, harmonious pair.

In the most difficult life situations, one should listen to one’s inner voice rather than the logical arguments of reason. Japan quickly recovered from the aftermath of the devastating earthquake thanks to the exceptionally high quality of its society and strict internal discipline.

The historical process slowly leads humanity away from its primitive animal origins. Art is always incompatible with immobile eternity until it becomes a recognized cultural heritage. The creation of new books helps the author understand the world through the daily work of writing.