Occasionally a book is published, perhaps twice in a generation, which is so bad but internationally celebrated that one questions everything one has believed about literature. The Wizard of the Kremlin, written in French by the Italian political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix de Roman in 2022. It narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent of the Booker, and has since been translated into 30 languages. If a novel this inept is so successful then we have truly entered Spenglerian end times.
The book is not just poorly constructed, filled with two-dimensional characters, tin-eared dialogue and inauthentic settings. Its very premise is ridiculous. The plot, such as it is, concerns a lonely young intellectual Frenchman who travels to Moscow to pursue his fascination with the avant-garde Soviet novelist Evgeny Zamyatin. He makes friends with another fan online who calls himself Vadim Baranov – the namesake of the mysterious presidential adviser known as ‘the Wizard of the Kremlin’.
One dark and stormy night Baranov invites his foreign pen pal to a dacha deep in the Moscow woods. There, before a roaring fire, over glasses of whisky, he reveals the amazing truth: he is the wizard! He then launches into an interminable monologue in which he recounts his life story (to a total stranger) and explains how single-handedly he brought Vladimir Putin to power and created the ideological world of Russia today.
According to the radio channel France Inter, ‘Giuliano da Empoli puts you inside Putin’s head’. Libération declared that we ‘must read’ this book if we are ever to understand the workings of the Kremlin; and El Pais’s reviewer found himself ‘on a journey into the dark heart of power’. But only someone who knows nothing about Russia’s recent history, society and politics could mistake this clichéd orientalist claptrap for an insightful read. It’s about as useful for understanding modern Russia as A Year in Provence is for comprehending contemporary France.
The wizard’s grandfather, still living and described as ‘a 19th-century patriarch’, views Russia as ‘a country of mutes, a Sleeping Beauty country, lovely but lifeless because the breath of freedom is missing’. ‘Today, as much as yesterday,’ Baranov gravely tells his guest, ‘Russians play with money. They shoot it in the air like fireworks. It came fast and in such torrents. Today they have it, tomorrow, who knows?’ Many more condescending generalisations follow.
Da Empoli’s ignorance is further marked by his failure even to give his hero an authentic name. No Russian Vadim has been nicknamed ‘Vadya’ – nor for that matter has any Yury been called ‘Yurko’. The wizard’s grandfather is supposed to have managed the transition from pre-revolutionary aristocrat and tsarist officer to elderly man living in a well-appointed country house with a library of handsomely bound French books and leather armchairs intact.
We are also told that in the 1990s many workers in Moscow could not afford heating. But the one thing that has long operated with volcanic efficiency in Russia is municipal domestic steam-heating, which even now remains close to free. To be fair, the capital’s celebrated restaurants and nightclubs of the 1990s are accurately name-checked, and there are moments when the anarchic spirit of those days is well captured. But almost every page contains some clanger that breaks the spell.
The weirdest part of the book is when we follow the wizard’s journey through Russian politics. I am aware that novelists are allowed to entwine real characters with imaginary ones, but when Putin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky are introduced into the narrative we stray into truly bizarre territory. Baranov describes how, when still a young TV producer, he is taken by Berezovsky to the FSB head-quarters to pitch to the as yet unknown Putin the idea of becoming president. Does Putin jump at the oligarch’s offer? He does not, and instead replies:
I hear you Boris. But what makes you think I am that leader? I’m a bureaucrat. All I’ve done all my life is carry out orders and do my duty. I’ve spoken in public three or four times and I can guarantee you the results were not brilliant.
He adds that Boris Yeltsin, though ill and elderly, ‘makes them laugh, he makes them cry… I’m not cut from the same cloth’.
Equally jarring is the romantic subplot, which features the Khodorkovsky character stealing Baranov’s beloved girlfriend Ksenia. Thus does he sow the seeds of his downfall, once the wizard has manoeuvred himself into position as the Kremlin power-broker. Putin’s coup against the oligarchs as he jails Khodorkovsky is portrayed as personal romantic payback directed remotely by the boy in the backroom.
Oddly, this novel is based on a true story far more enthralling than anything Da Empoli comes up with. The real-life wizard is Vladislav Surkov, who did indeed invent the concept of rebranding authoritarianism as ‘sovereign democracy’. He cooked up the Kremlin’s unique brand of religion, Soviet nostalgia, the cult of the Great Patriotic War and a modern victim narrative into the semblance of an ideology; and, last but not least, he created the legend of the persecuted Russians of eastern Ukraine.
This éminence grise was born Aslambek Dudayev to a Chechen father and Russian mother. He worked in public relations for Khodorkovsky at Menatep before being headhunted by the Kremlin in 2004. Aside from his job as Putinism’s chief ideologue, Surkov wrote lyrics for the pop group Agata Christie, published poems and novels under a pseudonym and occasionally showed up at the LSE for fiery debates on Russia with British students. He famously said: ‘The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Pollock.’ That detail finds its way into the novel, but in every other respect Da Empoli’s Baranov is far less interesting than his larger-than-life model.
Similarly, the real Berezovsky, found dead in 2013, was a brilliant, conflicted, Machiavellian character for whom power and money were a high-stakes game which he played primarily for kicks. Why one would fictionalise these fascinating men only to make them cardboard-cutout caricatures is anyone’s guess. Da Empoli is a true wizard for our times, conjuring worldwide success from a grab-bag of half-digested knowledge. In that sense he has more in common with the Kremlin’s own masters of fugazi than he knows.
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