“Death to Brudershaft” is the title of a cycle of 10 stories in the experimental genre of “Novel-Cinema”, designed to combine literary text with the visuality of cinema. This book includes the first two “films” of the series, which describe the beginning of the dramatic confrontation between Russian and German intelligence services in the First World War.* * *

“… “novel-film” is the name of the genre to which series refers. What genre is this? I came up with it myself, so this is my next experiment on my poor readers. I know that they only need one thing from me - that I write books about Erast Fandorin and not be distracted by all sorts of nonsense. But the way I’m built is that I need to try something new all the time. I'm sick to death of stylistic beauty and excess, which are considered Akunin's identifying marks. I wanted to write a text that would be completely devoid of literary allusions and would be very sparse stylistically. So that I don’t do all the work for the reader to load the pictures and atmosphere. Let the reader turn on his own film projector in his imagination. For this purpose, I invented all sorts of invisible things and tricks. If, while reading “Death to Brudershaft,” you mentally see a movie image, then the method works. “Operators” help me, that is, illustrators who draw still frames for this text film. For the first story - Igor Sakurov. For the second - Denis Gordeev. There are a lot of still frames in the book, almost like in a comic book, and this is also unusual for “adult literature.” There will be ten stories in total in this cycle. And all of them have already been invented.” B. Akunin