Modern Russia

When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low. He draws on his experiences in this book’s 17 essays, centred on topics ranging from politics to poetry, religion to rural affairs. Inevitably, war is a recurring theme. One of Amos’s interviewees, Sergei, works for a German

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