Giuliano da Empoli: “The Wizard of the Kremlin”

See all reviews

A reality where Putin is Tsar and the hypercynical nihilist Vadim Baranov is his advisor, his Raskolnikov, or his Machiavelli.

This is dark. It’s also funny and told so sharply that your brain can easily pick up on the sentences.

Because this is a novel, but a number of the characters in the novel are real: Putin is mentioned, but also oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky (the billionaire who tried to run against Putin and ended up in prison in Siberia, or Boris Berezovsky (who escaped to London but was found hanging in his own cashmere scarf, under mysterious circumstances).

The haunted house

These real figures are set in a novel structure that both creaks like a haunted house from the Victorian era, and at the same time seems just right for the horror we are told:

In the frame story, we meet an academic from the West interested in literature who is invited to a meeting with the fictitious and mysterious Vadim Baranov, Putin’s former powerful advisor for propaganda, who has now retired from all public activities.

A black Mercedes brings him to an old villa full of books. There, over the course of one night, Baranov tells him his story: How he went from theater director to being picked up as a major talent by the oligarchs.

Baranov then moved up to become the tsar’s, i.e. Putin’s, closest adviser. And the frame story disappears as he tells through the night: About the oligarchs’ inability to see that Putin was also dangerous for them, about how he himself made himself useful to Putin.

In Baranov’s dark world, there is no ideology, only power.

“The head is full of voices”

Dark power play

For Baranov, directing reality is more exciting than any theatre. The game is always about increasing power, guarding it, keeping it.

Ideology is of course a useful tool, if you can get people to believe in it. And that’s Baranov’s secret ability: He can manipulate people.

For his tsar, he transforms Russia into a quasi-democracy: a political landscape where they not only control authority, party and government, but also create their own, loyal opposition.

Baranov establishes parties, he supports the opposition, both on the right and the left – he gives the dissidents enough rope to hang on to.

The result is a Russia where no one can trust that anything is what it claims to be, where lies are truth and truth lies. It is a landscape where Putin can rule as he pleases, where his old cronies are getting richer and more obedient.

Baranov is shaping a nation where anyone who tries to protest finds the ground just slipping away from under their feet. Politics becomes like postmodern art.

We are so fascinated that we almost forget his evil.

A true role model

But of course this is a novel. Or, not quite.

For Baranov is clearly based on a real character: Vladislav Surkov was for many years Putin’s adviser, a powerful figure in the Kremlin’s darkest rooms. His career path is identical to Baranov’s, with studies in theater before becoming a PR man, spin doctor, and propaganda minister.

Surkov seemed to play with the role, he himself published a novel under a pseudonym (a male version of his wife’s name) in which he depicted the corruption and manipulation in Russia and in the Russian media. The practice he himself had cultivated and practiced with great zeal.

A few years ago, Surkov withdrew, as Baranov has done in this book. The game, the cynical manipulation, no longer gave as much pleasure. Or: he was fired. Or: He was imprisoned.

In Russian reality, as in the novel, there is apparently nothing certain to grasp onto.

It also shows in Baranov’s apparent conversion towards the end: It seems so unconstructed and unlikely that one finds oneself wondering whether it is Baranov’s novel character, the narrator in the novel, or Giuliano da Empoli who has made it up.

Debut novel

This is Giuliano da Empoli’s first novel. He usually writes political essays. Here he writes on a certain real-life literature with a basis in non-fiction.

To depict the Kremlin, fiction was clearly the best: the book won the big prize from the French Academy, and almost won the Goncourt prize, it took 14 more votes before another work finally won.

Even if the actual construction of the novel with its double frame story creaks, the text works brilliantly at the sentence level – here the pointed formulations about the race sparkle with philosophical aphorisms, all mounted on a jewel of references and references.