The mirroring plot-motif composition in Boris Akunin's works (on the example of the story “A problem of 2000” and the play “Saint Germain's mirror”)

The article deals with the role and specificity of the mirroring plot-motif composition in Boris Akunin’s works in the 2000s. Through a detailed comparison of motif chains in parallel plot structures in the story “A Problem of 2000” and its continuation - the comedy “Saint Germain’s Mirror”, three particularities of mirroring in Akunin’s texts are characterized: excessive symmetry, separation of non-hierarchical dual worlds, curved mirroring, or targeting satire on contemporaneity, corresponding to Akunin’s model of the world within the framework of postmodernism. After deciphering the meaning of the Chinese character in the title page, the intertextual game in “Saint Germain’s Mirror” is defined as an Akunin’s remake of Yukio Mishima’ play “The Magic Pillow: Kantan”, which is also the author’s embodiment of the traditional Sino-Japanese hypermotif “the dream in Handan”. The intertextual dialogue with this motif reveals the functioning of the magic mirror as the equivalent of a prophetic dream and the mirage nature of the mirror composition in Akunin’s text. By comparing the thematic similarities between two plays - the sensation of the turn of the era “life is like vanity” but the desire to live in this empty world, Akunin’s principle of mirroring composition is confirmed as a narrative expression of the mentality of society in the postmodern era, chronologically at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries. In the end, the analysis of the adaptation of the eastern plot to Russian culture reveals the mechanism of how Akunin’s text becomes a new androgynous of Eastern-Western literature and has the properties of cross-cultural mirroring and increasing entropy in contemporary literature.