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’.
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