History Literature / TheCoronation

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* {{Expy}}: As Wiki/TheOtherWiki notes, Akunin tweaked the RealLife identities of Nicholas II's three uncles. George Alexandrovich is named after Nicholas's younger brother but appears to be patterned after his uncle Alexei Alexandrovich--but Alexei had no children. Simeon Alexandrovich is named after Nicholas's real uncle Sergei Alexandrovich. And Cyril Alexandrovich is a stand-in for Nicholas's real uncle Vladimir Alexandrovich.

* AwesomeMomentOfCrowning: Averted. Zuikin is locked inside the basement of a gay nightclub and misses the entire coronation ceremony.

* ClosetShuffle: Izabella has t stuff Afanasii in a closet after her lover Pavel shows up, then has to stuff Pavel in a closet after her other lover, Pavel's father George, shows up.

* DramaticDrop: Poor Afaniisi does this after seeing the FingerInTheMail package.
* EitherOrTitle: As noted above the original Russian title is "Coronation, or the Last of the Romanovs".
* EvenTheGuysWantHim: Afaniisi is irritated to see Mr. Carr gazing out the window hungrily as Fandorin does his calisthenics on the front lawn of the palace.

* FirstPersonPeripheralNarrator: As with the bulk of the novels in the Fandorin series, the story is not told from Fandorin's POV. In this instance the narrator is Afanasii Zuikin, a valet in the imperial household. This is also the only Fandorin novel that is told through first-person narration.
* FunetikAksent: Used to represent Afanisii struggling to communicate with Mr. Freyby via an English-language dictionary.

* HaveAGayOldTime: Averted! "Queer", usually found in actual literature of the 1890s being used in the old sense, is used here in the modern sense. Pavel notes how his gay uncle Simeon has made the town hospitable for homosexuals. (In RealLife this was in fact around the time that "queer" first began to be uses as a homophobic slur.)

* HeManWomanHater: There's speculation that Dr Lind is this due to the fact that his gang only contains men. However, see below under ThePowerOfLove and SamusIsAGirl.
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: The three uncles might not count as they are Expys of their RealLife selves, but Film/NicholasAndAlexandra also appear. The tsar is depicted as a young man in his twenties just at the start of his disastrous reign, just as weak and vacillating just as he was in real life, while the tsarina is a foreigner that no one likes.

* INeverSaidItWasPoison: How Fandorin finally figures out that Declique is Lind. Mademoiselle Declique makes a joke out of Fandorin and Zuikin trying to use a crow to break open a door and rescue her, when she was should have been in the basement unable to see what they were doing.

* MyMasterRightOrWrong: Afanasii's attitude, as he is obviously enchanted with the glamour of monarchy and remarks on how one must honor and respect one's royal masters, even if they come home covered with vomit from a night of drinking like Pavel often does. His stonefaced reaction when he gets his promotion at the end, ands well as his lack of confidence in Nicholas II to carry on the dynasty, indicates that Afanasii is growing out of this.
* OneParagraphChapter: Afanasii's narration for 10 May ends with an angry Masa delivering a flying kick to the head after Afanisii mucks up their operation. The chapter for the next day, 11 May, consists in its entirety of "Saturday did not exist for me because I spent a night, a day, and another night lying in a dead faint."

* {{Expy}}: As TheOtherWiki notes, Akunin tweaked the RealLife identities of Nicholas II's three uncles. George Alexandrovich is named after Nicholas's younger brother but appears to be patterned after his uncle Alexei Alexandrovich--but Alexei had no children. Simeon Alexandrovich is named after Nicholas's real uncle Sergei Alexandrovich. And Cyril Alexandrovich is a stand-in for Nicholas's real uncle Vladimir Alexandrovich.

* TheMistress: Izabella Snezhnevskaya is one to the entire Romanov family, having first been the mistress to Alexander III, then passed down to his son Nicholas (the future Nicholas II), then passed up to Nicholas's uncle George after Nicholas got engaged to Alexandra, then ''shared'' between George and his son Pavel.

* CallForward: Mr. Freyby is of course entirely correct when he observes at the very end of the novel that Nicholas II will be "[[UsefulNotes/RedOctober the last of the Romanovs]]."

* HistoricalDomainCharacter: The three uncles might not count as they are Expys of their RealLife selves, but Nicholas II also appears, a young man in his twenties just at the start of his disastrous reign. Nicholas is depicted as weak and vacillating just as he was in real life.