Nicholas Fandorin

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Nicholas Alexandrovich Fandorin
Николай Александрович Фандорин
First appearance Altyn Tolobas
Created by Boris Akunin
Information
Gender Male
Date of birth c. 1960
Occupation historian, private counselor
Spouse(s) Altyn Mamaeva
Алтын Мамаева

Nicholas Fandorin is the protagonist of three novels by Boris Akunin, subtitled Приключения магистра "adventures of the magister [viz., the MA]". The uniting concept of the series is that each novel combines two storylines, one set in present-day Russia (in 1995 to 2005), and a related one set in the Tsarist Russia (in the 1670s, 1790s, and 1860s).

Nicholas is the grandson of Erast Fandorin, born in ca. 1960. His father was Alexander Fandorin (1920-1994), born in British exile where his pregnant mother had fled from the Russian Civil War. Nicholas has a master's degree in history, specializing in the 19th century history of the Russian Empire, and (in Altyn Tolobas) visits the land of his ancestors for the first time in 1995, after the fall of the Soviet Union, tracing the founder of the Russian Fandorins, s Swabian musketeer Cornelius von Dorn who took service with the Tsar in 1675, and died in the 1682 Moscow uprising, nine generations removed from Nicholas. In Extracurricular Reading he is married to a Tatar woman, Altyn Mamaeva, and has abandoned his British citizenship for a Russian passport. The parallel story concerns the 4th and 5th Fandorins after Cornelius in the last years of the reign of Catherine the Great. F.M. concerns a lost manuscript of (F.M.) Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, set in the decade predating the setting of the first Erast Fandorin novel.

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