North Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have grown up with a horribly skewed impression of Russia. Years and years of indoctrination have caused us to dismiss one the oldest and most complex civilizations in history as simply the enemy without knowing or even attempting to understand its history or culture. Ever since the Western powers conspired to overthrow the popular revolution of 1918 by sending in troops to try and restore the Tsar to power, it's been an us and them situation that's only ever briefly abated.

The time it did abate was the one period in the last century when it appeared Russia was willing to bend its knee to the will of the west. But the moment the current government began to think for itself, to put its interests ahead of the interests of the West, the assault upon their character began again. Fear of the old Soviet Union shaped American foreign policy for fifty years, causing them to overthrow legitimate governments, prop up dictators, fight unpopular wars, and forge alliances that have since come back to haunt them. It's to be hoped that their reaction to the new Russian national pride won't be as extreme and they won't be as quick to judge Russia by their own standards.

But even back in the days before the Revolution, and all the crowned heads of Europe were still related to each other, Russia was considered different. Being on a different calendar, the Russian Orthodox differed by twelve days, practising another form of Christianity, and speaking a language with a different alphabet was enough to make them as alien to most Europeans as if they were from the Ottoman Empire of the Turks.

The oddity was the result this seemed to have upon the character of the educated Russian and the nobility. Where one might have expected an outburst of fervent nationalism as a reaction, instead the trend was to emulate the trends and styles of their cousin courts. It was common practice for the educated Russian to be at least fluent in French, if not German and English as well. Even after Napoleon had attempted to expand his empire into the Motherland, capturing Moscow in the process, a knowledge of French was considered de rigour for acceptance among the sophisticated and the elite.

So the fact that Erast Fandorin, a lowly clerk in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Russian Police in the 1870s, would speak fluent French, English, and German would not be considered too out of the ordinary. If there is anything out of the ordinary about Fandorin, it's the fact that he is a character in a book written by contemporary Russian author Boris Akunin and not someone brought to life by Tolstoy, Gorky, or Checkov during the nineteenth century.