At the heart of power—of all power—is loneliness.
Animal instincts and violence predominate.
Giuliano da Empoli (Paris, 49) spent years watching him from the inside in Italy as an adviser to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and other politicians.
Add to this experience the literary pull, and as an object of study, of a country where the exercise of power unfolds in all its brutality: Vladimir Putin's Russia.
And a considerable dose of imagination.
The result is
Le mage du Kremlin
(
The Magician of the Kremlin
), one of the novels of the year in France and an authentic treatise, not only on the Kremlin in Putin's time, but on power in its crudest aspect.
It is also one of the books that is being talked about the most these days at the Frankfurt Fair, which runs until Sunday.
"I wanted to write a book about power, not a book specifically about Russia," explains Da Empoli in a café in Paris, the city where he lives.
“And the power dynamics are similar.
What changes are the limits placed on this power.
But the impulses and the dynamics of the court are a bit the same”.
The novel - written in parallel in Italian and French versions, but first published in French by the Gallimard publishing house - has sold more than 100,000 copies.
And it appears in the selection for the Goncourt, the most prestigious prize of French letters.
There is still no planned edition in Spanish.
Surprised by the success?
“Obviously”, replies Da Empoli.
At the very least, she had the gift of opportunity.
The novel hit French bookstores last April, when the war had only been going on for a month and a half.
“Today it seems very clever, but while I was writing it, it was not that it was out of date, but it was a bit lateral as an idea for a novel.
I didn't expect it to become a bestseller."
Vladislav Surkov, in a meeting with other political officials in Lipetsk, Russia, in 2010. Konstantin Zavrazhin (Getty Images)
In the novel, the Putin years—his rise to power, the Chechen war, the purges of oligarchs, the disinformation campaigns, the first war in Ukraine in 2014—unfold before the reader with an inside look.
It is the gaze of Vadim Baranov, cosmopolitan bohemian, avant-garde playwright, reality TV producer who, on the eve of the new millennium, becomes the Russian leader's Rasputin, his courtly adviser, the architect of the Kremlin power scene in the that everything is theater and manipulation, fictions on a large scale.
Baranov's character is loosely inspired by Vladislav Surkov, the authentic “Kremlin magician”, today removed from power.
Surkov formulated theories such as "sovereign democracy" or "vertical power",
Da Empoli, author of essays such as
The Engineers of Chaos
(Oberon publishing house, in Spanish), thought that, to talk about Putin, the Kremlin, Baranov and power seen from the inside, fiction was preferable.
"If you write an essay, there comes a time when you have to stop: you can only say what you know, what you have shown, the facts," he argues.
“I wanted to get into the heads of these characters and make the reader enter, to explain the experience of power and of a quite uncontrolled power such as the Russian.
Paradoxically, I believe that fiction is the only way to do this.
I don't think I have invented many things, but I have imagined a lot”.
Experience with politicians like Renzi has helped him from his time as mayor of Florence to the presidency of the Italian Council between 2014 and 2016. It is not that he has transferred facts directly to the novel: the Kremlin is not the Chigi Palace or an autocracy like Russia is a Western democracy.
But he relies on what he calls "an almost anthropological observation of power," applicable anywhere and on elements that, to varying degrees, are present not only in Moscow.
Da Empoli, during the interview in Paris. BRUNO ARBESÚ
One of these elements is violence.
political violence.
Da Empoli knew her closely in 1986, when her father, the economist and adviser to the socialist government of the time, Antonio da Empoli, was the victim of a terrorist attack.
He survive.
Guiliano was 12 years old.
Power, according to Da Empoli, "is an exercise of great violence."
"In our countries, luckily, it's symbolic violence," she reflects, "but in less democratically structured systems, it easily turns into physical violence as well, and attracts characters with a certain aptitude for it."
The Kremlin Wizard
is a journey to the dark heart of this power, "a place dominated and governed by irrationality," says the author.
"The closer you get to the heart, and obviously even more so in a system like Russia with few limits on power, this heart is a heart of impulses."
Da Empoli's Putin, told through the eyes of Councilor Baranov, is a political animal in the sense —explains the author— that the writer Elias Canetti gave to the term: someone who wants to survive the whole world.
"And taking this to the extreme," he adds, "if you want to outlive everyone, you end up killing everyone, even those around you."
"This drive of the political animal is the same everywhere: the difference is that in our countries you cannot kill your advisers, while in Russia you can go further."
At the end of the book —and this is not a
spoiler
: it is told from the beginning— Councilor Baranov leaves the Kremlin.
Putin, like the caudillo in a Latin American novel, remains isolated in his labyrinth.
“Every once in a while a guard shows up, a servant shows up, or a courtier, summoned for one reason or another.
That's all," reads the last pages.
"The tsar lives in a world in which even the best of friends become courtiers or implacable enemies, and almost always both at once."
Everything that is told in
The Magician of the Kremlin
, the imagined and the real, takes place before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
And yet, everything we have seen since last February 24 – the lies and the violence, the brutality of power and its madness, its loneliness – is here.
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