Giuliano da Empoli was born in France, lives in Paris and teaches at Sciences Po. The Kremlin Mage (2022) is his first novel; with his Italian roots, he advised Matteo Renzi and was politically active in Florence and Milan. The novel takes Putin's advisor Vladislav Surkov as a model for his political fiction, which made the first shortlist for the Goncourt Prize, as a novel about contemporary Russia. The war in Ukraine, which is also depicted in the novel, is of course implicitly part of the evaluation.
« This war is not a battle in the real world, Alexandre, this battle is in the tête of the gens. The importance of your actions on the champion of the battle is not only important in the villes, but also in the cerveaux that you conquer. Pas ici. To Moscou, to Kiev, to Berlin. Pense à nos compatriotes Russes qui, grâce à vous, retrouvent le sens héroïque de la vie, de la lutte between le bien et le mal et qui admirent le Tsar, qui défend nos valeurs against les nazis ukrainiens et la décadence des Occidentaux. Our children are not connected to the chaos of the four-year-old years, and the father of the poutine incarnates the stability and the grandeur of the mère patrie. Ensuite, pense aux Ukraines qui, grâce à vous, complaufent l'Erreur qu'ils ont commise: ils espéraient que la révolution orange les amène en Europe et en fait elle les a ramenés au Moyen Âge, à l'anarchie et à la violence sans fin. Et pense aux Occidentaux qui, grâce à vous, se sont draw à respecter, et jusqu'à craindre, la Russie. It is available at the end of the history, but it is still the dimension of the error. Nous, nous n'avons pas oublié ce que ça signifie d'etre des hommes, de lutter, d'etre prêts à mourir. Nous n'avons pas peur de nous salir les mains. There is a beautiful difference between life and death in no time. Eux l'ont oublié, mais pas nous. Nous sommes ici pour leur rappeler, Alexandre. »
Giuliano da Empoli, The Kremlin Mage
"This war is not fought in reality, Alexander; it is fought in people's minds. The significance of your actions on the battlefield is not measured by the cities you capture, but by the minds you conquer. This is not true here. In Moscow, in Kyiv, in Berlin. Think of our fellow Russians who, thanks to you, are rediscovering the heroic spirit of life, the struggle between good and evil, and admiring the Tsar who defended our values against the Ukrainian Nazis and the decadence of the West. Our young people did not experience the chaos of the 1990s; someone had to remind them that Putin embodies the stability and greatness of the Motherland. Then think of the Ukrainians who, thanks to you, understand the mistake they made: they hoped the Orange Revolution would bring them to Europe, and in reality, it threw them back into the Middle Ages, into anarchy and endless violence. And think of the people in the West who, thanks to you, once again respect and even fear Russia. They had thought the end of history." They believed it, now they realize the extent of their error. We, on the other hand, have not forgotten what it means to be human, to fight, and to be prepared to die. We are not afraid to get our hands dirty. There is a big difference between living and trying not to die. They have forgotten that, but we have not.
"The only true duty at court is to be present. To be there, always, every time there is even the slightest possibility that the ruler's gaze might fall upon you." 1 In light of such statements, French critics – such as Jérôme Garcin in Nouvel Observateur – the book contains a new form of 17th-century French moralism. Thesis of Giuliano da Empoli's political writing The engineers of chaos (2019) was that populism, or rather its leaders, in Europe increasingly rely on the assistance of spin doctors, ideologues, academics, and big data experts. Surkov is included among these, and the novel can now be read as a fiction-free analysis of his biography and the Russian political system as portrayed by the Chechen-born Vadim Baranov. The references to France are obvious; for example, a continuity is established through a reference to Marquis Astolphe de Custine's 19th-century book on Russia. And the political principles that prevailed in Versailles and continue in the White House or the Élysée Palace are intensified in Russia.
Grand-père détestait the « Voyage en Russie ». Et pourtant il était fasciné. « Ce maudit Français is the best interpreter of the Russie, disait-il, parce qu'ici la Cour a toujours été la seule façon d'arriver au pouvoir et aux richesses. S'appuyer sur les passions populaires en Russie ne sert à rien: à la fin celui qui gagne fonde toujours son pouvoir sur la Cour. C'est pourquoi le meilleur moyen est l'adulation, pas le talent, le silence, pas l'éloquence. Custine voit les nobles de Pétersbourg se promener sans manteau en winter pour aduler the tsar. Et ils meurent. Il n'y a pas de café pour commenter des journaux qui n'existent pas et les newes changent toujours selon celui qui les raconte à mi-voix. Pays de muets, pays de la belle endormie, merveilleux mais sans vie parce qu'y manque le souffle de la liberté. Aujourd'hui come here. »
Giuliano da Empoli, The Kremlin Mage
Grandfather hated "The Journey to Russia." And yet he was fascinated. "That damned Frenchman is the best interpreter of Russia," he said, "because here the court has always been the only way to attain power and wealth. Relying on the passions of the people in Russia is pointless: in the end, the victor always bases his power on the court. That's why the best means is flattery, not talent; silence, not eloquence. Custine sees the nobles in St. Petersburg running around in winter without coats to worship the Tsar. And they die. There's no café to comment on newspapers that don't exist, and the news is always changing depending on who's telling it in a half-speak. Land of the mute, land of sleeping beauties, wonderful, but lifeless because it lacks the breath of freedom. Today as yesterday."
However, the fictionalized biography is accompanied by real Russian people; among other things, the novel tells the story of Putin's transformation into "the Tsar":
En effet, après un bref passage par le secretariat, nous fûmes introduits dans un cabinet qui aurait pu être le lieu de travail d'un chief de service du ministère des Postes. Son occupant, a blond pale aux traits décolorés, portant un costume en acrylique beige, arborait a mine d'employé, veinée d'une imperceptible pointe de sarcasm. « Vladimir Poutine », this is in me serrant la main.
In this époque, the Tsar n'était pas encore le Tsar: de ses gestes n'émanait pas l'autorité inflexible qu'ils acquerraient par la suite et, bien que dans son regard on devinât déjà la qualité minérale que nous lui connaissons aujourd'hui, celle-ci était comme voilée par l'effort conscient de la tenir sous control. Cela dit, sa presence transmettait a sentiment de calme.
In his habitude, Boris now has a word of words that all along the way, or in the same direction: c'était à lui, Poutine, de prendre les rênes de la situation pour faire passer la Russie dans the new millénaire.
Giuliano da Empoli, The Kremlin Mage
After a brief walk through the secretariat, we were led into an office that could have been the workplace of a department head at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. The owner, a pale blond man with faded features, wore a beige acrylic suit and had the expression of a clerk with an imperceptible hint of sarcasm. "Vladimir Putin," he said, shaking my hand.
Back then, the Tsar was not yet the Tsar: his gestures did not radiate the unyielding authority they would later acquire, and although his eyes already displayed the mineral quality we know of him today, it was veiled by a conscious effort to keep it under control. Nevertheless, his presence conveyed a sense of calm.
As usual, Boris overwhelmed him with a torrent of words, all more or less going in the same direction: He, Putin, had to take the reins to lead Russia into the new millennium.
Had this text been published in 2021, the following scene could already be read as a prophetic exposure of a disciplined, polite power strategist. But even so, it should be pointed out that The Kremlin Mage It appeared the day after the war began in Ukraine, and ended a year before the Russian invasion!
Durant toute notre rencontre, Poutine avait fait preuve d'une courtoisie impeccable face à Boris. De déférence même, pendant qu'il écoutait les conseils de l'homme d'affaires. Et pourtant, when Berezovsky s'addressait à lui, avec la familiarité quii était propre, il m'avait semblé percevoir an ombre d'agacement dans le regard du fonctionnaire. It is also available to you with this irony, like that, when Boris is available to you as a famous guide. This is the idea that you can be guided by this person who also has a great look at the head of the FSB.
Giuliano da Empoli, The Kremlin Mage
Throughout our entire meeting, Putin had displayed impeccable courtesy toward Boris. He was even deferential as he listened to the businessman's advice. But when Berezovsky addressed him with his characteristic familiarity, it seemed to me that the official saw a flicker of irritation in his eyes. And then there was that ironic flash at the end, when Boris had promised to guide him step by step. As if the FSB chief had found the very idea of being guided by this man utterly comical.
The novel presents a very European view of Russia and cannot entirely deny its political science origins, stating that Putin had, for years, picked up the threads of Russian history: "The Russia of Alexander Nevsky, the Third Rome of the Patriarchs, the Russia of Peter the Great, the Russia of Stalin, and the Russia of today. Therein lay Putin's greatness, but then he succumbed to the temptation of finding action in the continuity of power." 2
In his book review, Marc Lapon concluded the following about the Kremlin magician: “His discreet influence extends to a former FSB agent, Vladimir Putin, who was co-opted by a bled-dry Yeltsin. Kojève readers, admirers of the demolition experts of the American myth—Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, or Jackson Pollock—this Machiavelli in a fur hat understands politics as a mixture of gangsta rap and neo-Sarism. Cold analysis: Since violence is constitutive of the Russian ethos, it can be cynically manipulated in the service of a pale descendant of Ivan the Terrible. The Putin system, a mixture of trompe-l'oeil and imperial reconquest, dramatizes reality with kitschy mythology, fake news, profound disgrace, and polonium murders. Drawing on the second principle of thermodynamics, Surkov-Baranov establishes an axiom that his master…” which will be brought to a close in 2022: consolidating a society by exporting its share of the chaos to a nearby country. This leads to enclaves being claimed as Russian, Crimea or Donbass, and others being demonized as neo-Nazis, invoking Stalin's gesture towards Ukraine of the Holocaust with firearms: the horror has the fallacy of camouflage, the massacre is a chronology. 3 This also makes it clear that the novel's portrayal of Russia is told from a European perspective; Russia is the Other of Europe. And Giuliano da Empoli, as a new Custine, tells a Russian story of decadence that reflects Putin's rhetoric of Western decadence. Paul Vacca, for example, calls the novel an "epic of chaos": "The novel takes us into the breathtaking epic of Putin's power: from the punk ecstasy of the early days, when 'you could go out to buy cigarettes and two days later wake up half-naked in a chalet in Courchevel surrounded by sleeping beauties,' to the ossification of a power that revels in its absolute exercise and dreams eternally, ever more isolated, with a Labrador as its only advisor in the end." 4
La Russie is the machine à cauchemars de l'Occident. À la fin du dix-neuvième, vos intellectuels ont rêvé la révolution. Nous l'avons faite. You communism, you don't have a parler. Nous l'avons vécu pendant soixante-dix ans. Puis es arrivé the moment of capitalisme. Et même en cela, our summers are all beautiful plus loin que vous. Dans les années quatre-vingt-dix, personne n'a déréglé, privatisé, laissé de place à l'initiative des entrepreneurs plus que nous. There are also great fortunes, parties, without rules and without limits. Nous y avons vraiment cru, mais ça n'a pas marché.
Giuliano da Empoli, The Kremlin Mage
Russia is the West's nightmare machine. At the end of the 19th century, your intellectuals dreamed of revolution. We made it happen. You only talked about communism. We lived it for seventy years. Then came the era of capitalism. And even then, we went much further than you. In the 1990s, no one deregulated, privatized, or gave entrepreneurial initiative more space than we did. The greatest fortunes were built here, from nothing, without rules and without limits. We truly believed in it, but it didn't work.
Should this novel win the Prix Goncourt, it would probably be interpreted as ideological war propaganda from Europe, but in addition to the aforementioned themes, the fiction also proves to be a homage to the history of a country – and is incidentally also a novel about art.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- "La seule vraie obligation de la Cour est la présence. Y être, all, chaque fois qu'existe, aussi faible soit-elle, la possibilité que le regard du sovereign se pose sur vous." Giuliano da Empoli, The Kremlin Mage>>>
- "La Russie d'Alexandre Nevski, la Troisième Rome des patriarches, celle de Pierre le Grand, la Russie de Staline et celle d'aujourd'hui. En cela résidait la grandeur de Poutine, mais il avait ensuite cédé à la tentation de trouver, dans la continuité de la force, la trame qu'il cherchait [...]." Giuliano da Empoli, The Kremlin Mage.>>>
- "Son ascendant discret s'exerce sur un ancien agent du FSB, Vladimir Poutine, coopté par un Eltsine exsangue. Infox, disgrâces, assassinats... Lecteur de Kojève, admirant les dynamiteurs du mythe Américain - Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg ou Jackson Pollock -, le Machiavel à toque de fourrure conçoit la Politique comme un mélange de gangsta rap et de néotsarisme. Analyze froide: la violence étant constitutive de l'ethos russe, on peut la manipuler cyniquement au service d'un descendant blême d'Ivan le Terrible Mélange de trompe-l'oeil et de reconquête imperiale, le système Poutine Theaterise the réel à coups de mythologie kitsch, d'infox, de disgrâces abyssales et d'assassinats au polonium. S'inspirant du deuxième principe de la thermodynamique, Sourkov-Baranov pose un axiome que son maître va mener à son terme en 2022: consolidator une société en exportant sa part de chaos dans un pays proche. Cela conduit à revendiquer des enclaves comme Russes, Crime ou Donbass, et en diaboliser d'autres comme néonazies, en invoquant la geste de Staline face à l'Ukraine de la Shoah par balles: the horror a pour atour leurre, le massacre “It’s a chronicle.” Marc Lambron, “Poutine between the lignes”, The Point, May 9, 2022.>>>
- “Le roman nous entraîne dans l'épopée étourdissante du pouvoir poutinien: de l'exaltation punk des débuts où « You can sort your cigarettes and buy them for two days plus tard, in a chalet in Courchevel with a room now surrounded by endormic beauties » à la glaciation d'un pouvoir qui s'enivre de son exercise absolu et se rêve éternel, toujours plus solitaire avec à la fin pour seul conseiller, un labrador.” Paul Vacca, “L'épopée du chaos”, Les Echos, 26. April 2022.>>>
