Aleksandr Livergant. Agatha Christie: The witness for the prosecution

Abstract

The review considers the first Russian biography of Agatha Christie authored by A. Livergant. Opening with a prologue that reconstructs the events preceding the writer’s famous disappearance, the biography combines a wealth of facts with good artistic quality. That it should be rich in facts is required by the book’s genre, but the biography’s very structure, which resembles a work of fiction, with its prologue, thirteen chapters and ‘In place of an epilogue,’ conveys the idea of the inseparability of life from writing. Since Christie drew inspiration for her mysteries from journeys and her own life’s events, the structure seems particularly appropriate. Moreover, it offers a principally new optics for the examination of the writer’s legacy: something more than works of a gifted artisan of the genre, Christie’s texts are a product of a specific context made up by historical and cultural developments as well as other works of fiction, of which many have been translated by Livergant or examined in his other biographies