For some reason, Putin sells like no other. News about him instantly increases the ratings of television programs, most books that try to reveal his personality disappear from bookstores faster than warm bread from bakeries.

Historians, political scientists, Sovietologists, Kremlinologists, Russians wrote about Putin and the essence of his power, and it so happens that almost every two or three months a new book dedicated to the tsar appears on the shelves of bookstores. . So it is quite natural that Volodymyr Volodymyrovych also became a character in some works of art. A decisive step in this regard is the novel Wizard from the Kremlin thanks to the Italo-Swiss Giuliano da Empoli. I don’t think that the moment when the image of Putin will make waves in a cinematic blockbuster is not far off.

Da Empoli book, published in 2022 by a prestigious French publishing house Gallimard, awarded the Grand Prix of the French Academy, has the extraordinary quality of being a true bestseller, and this without any concessions to cheap sensationalism. This is fiction, not a treatise on political science. The novelist’s documentation is perfect, the events and characters transferred from real life seem better conveyed by lines invented by Empoli, and yes, the story is truly Russian. Although they don’t really drink tea and even a lot of vodka. However, Gorby is ridiculed over a glass of milk.

Wizard from the Kremlin these are the works of a person who is familiar with great Russian literature, with novels describing the hell of the Soviet Gulag, with the mechanisms of Stalin’s power and its metamorphoses up to Brezhnev, Gorbachev, or Yeltsin, with the memoirs of the Marquis de Coustin. As at one time Giuliano da Empoli was among the advisers of the former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, as the same da Empoli is the author of a significant number of non-fiction books, mostly applied political science studies, and as today, all Empoli is a professor Scieces Po from Paris, it was expected that the novel would be filled with a significant amount of thoughts put into the mouth of Vadym Baranov. For a long time, the tsar’s chief image advisor. Which he had the opportunity to know since the days when Volodymyr Volodymyrovych was apparently unknown to no one and an almost meaningless head of the FSB and in which the oligarch Boris Berezovsky intuitively prepared for him a rapid rise.

Unlike Berezovsky, then Khodorkovsky, who on the first pages of the book is called simply Mykhailo (it is he who steals Ksyusha from Vadym) or many others. security forces, many of those who for some time were close to Putin and considered themselves his friends (they did not even know what Soviet friendship meant since Stalin’s time), or opponents such as Garry Kasparov, Baranov understood early that “power is like the sun and like death. You can’t look in the face. Especially in Russia.” So shortly after the end of the Olympics in Sochi, feeling that something was wrong with Putin, Baranov resigned. And “stories about him, instead of dying out, multiplied.”

This phrase from the beginning of the novel is the equivalent of a famous saying marquis that isand at 5 o’clock This is where the story of a Frenchman fascinated by Moscow and a novel begins we Zamyatin, a Frenchman who has become a kind of alter ego over the centuries of the so famous, but at the same time hated Kyustin, and who unexpectedly finds himself around Baranov. A character in which Vladyslav Surkov is not difficult to identify. Many consider him Putin’s Machiavelli. Passion for Zamyatin’s novel, we don’t know how Baranov found out about it, besides, the Frenchman doesn’t know it either, leads him to the former house of Machiavelli. Who, telling what it was like to exist in close proximity with Putin, restores the course of descent and the core of political philosophy magician from the Kremlin.

Putin was the fifth prime minister during the time when old Eltin was in the Kremlin. The prime minister invented by Berezovsky, who felt his potential, but not all the twists and turns of his personality. Being a part, as Baranov believes, for a long time of what Stanislavsky called category of great actorsAt first, Putin left many with the impression that he was easy to manipulate. But this was not the case at all, and Berezovsky, who did not understand his warnings, left the stage. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro