Ethnic and national problems in B. Akunin's work (project “History of the Russian state”)

B. Akunin's latest historical and literature project “History of the Russian State” was studied in a number of aspects. Firstly, a historical concept underlying this project was analyzed. Secondly, an attempt to find out correlations between the history and literature, peculiar for the modern variant of interpretation the beginning and further development of the Russian state was undertaken. Thirdly, B. Akunin's version of the problem of the Russian national development, directly connected with the process of the Russian state formation, was studied. The conducted analysis helped to identify the main three levels of the “Russianness” and the means employed by the author to reflect this phenomenon: the mystery of the Russian character; the importance of the Russian Orthodox Church; and the principal polyethnicity as a basis of the national integrity. The analysis revealed the author's stylistic devices used to solve numerous ethnic and national problems: addition of another (“non-Russian”) conscience, substantiated by the visual anthropology; the mirror reflection principle; and an opened national self-identification within the text. Finally, a conclusion of the possible development of the project along the force line of Eurasianism is made: the results of sudden changes of civilization in Russian history will be analyzed in the works on history, the controversial polyethnicity will probably become the basis for the psychological depiction of the appearance of the Russian so-called “mecheny” (“labeled”) kin.