Sister Pelagia is a fictional 19th century Russian nun, the protagonist of a three-book series of mystery novels by Boris Akunin.
The first novel, Pelagia and the White Bulldog (US title: Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog) (Пелагия и белый бульдог) 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.
The plot contains many allusions to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Anton Chekhov's Black Monk, and several novels by Dostoevsky.
[2] In Pelagia and the Red Rooster (US title: Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel) (Пелагия и красный петух), 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.