Sister Pelagia
Sister Pelagia is a fictional 19th century Russian nun, the protagonist of a three-book series of mystery novels by Boris Akunin.
First novel
The first novel, Pelagia and the White Bulldog is set in Zavolzhsk and the surrounding countryside. It centers around the arrival from St. Petersburg of an Inquisitor from the Holy Synod and the great evils that follow. It was published in English in 2006 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson with.
Second novel
In the second novel, Pelagia and the Black Monk, Pelagia investigates strange events in a remote island monastery in Mitrofanii's diocese. The plot contains many allusions to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Anton Chekhov's Black Monk, and several novels by Dostoevsky. It was published in English in 2007 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson with.
In Pelagia and the Red Rooster, the action takes the reader from a steamboat on the Volga to Stroganovka, a fictional village near the Urals, and on to Jerusalem, an early Zionist commune in Megiddo and to Sodom. Events in Imperial Russia move to Zhytomyr and Saint Petersburg. The context is the flourishing millennialism and sectarianism in 19th century Imperial Russia.