You have been a political adviser – in particular to the President of the Italian Council Matteo Renzi – and have written a dozen essays to date before embarking on this first novel: why did you choose fiction to tell the backstage of Russian power in the last 20 years ?
I first wrote an essay called Chaos Engineers [paru en 2019] on new propaganda techniques; and this book is a sort of fictional spin-off. I prepared the novel as if it were an essay. Moreover, the basis is factual; all the facts that are told in the novel are real. All Russian reality is often so romantic that you don’t even have to make a great effort of the imagination to access fiction. And then I wanted to go beyond the limits and constraints of the essay to take a step further and try to imagine a point of view, to project myself onto these characters, and that’s when the novel took shape.
Was writing a bigger challenge for you?
When you write an essay, you use a part of your brain that’s pretty well defined, the rather rational part, and you demonstrate, but it’s pretty simple. On the other hand, writing a novel mobilizes you entirely: your experience, your feelings, your passions, your rationality, too, of course. And when you’re used to writing essays, freeing yourself and accessing this other dimension, it’s a challenge — and I really wanted to confront myself with this challenge. But I did not intend, by writing this book, to launch a career as a novelist; I wanted to write it in the form of a novel. There are personal reasons too; I wanted to dedicate to my daughter, who is 12, a book that would be a little less perishable, perhaps, than a topical essay.
Which of the novel’s two main characters interested you most when you started writing it: Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Putin’s political adviser who inspired your character Vadim Baranov, or the Russian president himself?
Both, especially the relationship between the two. Baranov, whose real model is in fact Surkov — although I radically transformed him in relation to his real model (and that’s why I changed his name) — he is someone, in fiction and reality, very different from the characters that generally surround Putin — especially former KGB or businessmen. He is someone who has this somewhat artistic dimension, a sort of artist of reality who comes from theater and television and who will interpret his role with Putin a bit like an artistic performance.
I think they are two characters that complement each other quite well because Putin represents a certain type of force that reconnects very well with the tradition of Russian rulers and Soviet tsars — he invades countries, he sends his tanks to conquer or reconquer territories — whereas Baranov is someone who is completely at ease in this dimension of intersecting narratives, which can contradict each other, which create a whole theater, precisely, of real and false characters, of manipulation. And so he gives Putin something he doesn’t have.
How did you come to be interested in politics?
I was kind of immersed in it from the very beginning. My father was an economist, I grew up outside Italy and when we returned to Rome, my father was the victim, when I was 12, of a terrorist attack which he survived. So I was introduced to politics — and political violence — very early on. As far as I can remember, it has always been part of my life and it has fascinated me enormously.
You write that Moscow is “the saddest and most beautiful of the great imperial capitals”, in addition to depicting with great precision in the novel certain Russian peculiarities. Where does this knowledge of Russia come from?
I landed in Moscow somewhat by chance, when I was deputy mayor of Florence for culture, for an Italian film festival in 2011. This sort of black energy of the city that emanates from blood, the luster fossilized Kremlin, Stalinist architectures, all that struck me enormously. I went back after and although I didn’t spend a lot of time there, I kind of resonated with this place. It’s a place that scared me too, but at the same time, we are attracted to things that scare us.
A meeting with Giuliano da Empoli is scheduled for this Saturday at the Gallimard bookstore (3700, boulevard Saint-Laurent), at 5 p.m.
The Kremlin Mage
Giuliano da Empoli
Gallimard
288 pages