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After all, one did not write a book for other people. Any more than one wrote it for an already existing self. One wrote it, in fact, to renew one’s own self in the process of writing, and creatively go beyond its previous limits. Or in other words: to transcend oneself. Thus it is not for others that each person transcends himself; one writes books and invents machines that were demanded nowhere.

I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I will read fewer books this year, because the ones in my stack are generally long and difficult. It took me several weeks to get through THE VISIONARIES by Wolfram Eilenberger, which is not as well-written as the other book by him I’ve read, TIME OF THE MAGICIANS, and since both books have the same translator, the busted sentences, tangled syntaxes and wild tonal inconsistencies are all on Eilenberger and his original editor.

It is, despite that, full of good stuff.

It follows the lives of four female philosophers – Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil – in the period 1933-1943, showing their intellectual emergence and comparing and contrasting their lives. They didn’t really know each other: de Beauvoir and Weil met once, and de Beauvoir records that meeting:

I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,” she snapped. Our relations ended right there.

Its biggest problem is tonal – it veers between warmly autobiographical, admiring and accepting, critical and faintly shitty (especially in de Beauvoir’s case). But it does, remarkably, make you want to root for the young Ayn Rand. And when he stops reifying Weil’s hallucinations and frowning on de Beauvoir’s love life, he surfaces a ton of wonderful and useful things, and it’s worth the money just for that.

But in Weil’s view the human being is not small enough. Because in comparison with the transcendent infinity with which Dasein faces God, the infinity of the social is only a secondary and derivative substitute, earthbound and hence practically diabolical. Weil joins with Plato in describing this sphere of the social and of social pressure as “the Great Beast”: “Obedience to the Great Beast: that is wherein the social virtues lie.”

…in the Notebooks Weil’s critique of “the great We” goes far beyond this commonplace, and quite fundamentally takes aim against the sphere of the social as the ultimate object of moral action (in whichever form). Even Ayn Rand could not have put it in such extreme terms: “Man is a social animal, and the social element represents evil.”

THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+)

He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were.

This is a cracking little book. Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and politician with a background in theatre, was Putin’s “grey cardinal” for twenty years, behind some of Russia’s creepiest psyops. da Empoli was so fascinated by this man and the mystique behind him that he created a fictional version, Vadim Baranov, who came from an aristocratic family line, avant-garde theatre and reality tv to help place Putin in power and become the Wizard of the Kremlin.

A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics.

When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you. Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant-garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.

This is Baranov’s story, often apparently closely paralleling Surkov’s – and pretty much all the other characters in the book are not fictional, and neither are many of the things that happened, really. Yes, it’s fiction, but it rides alongside the actual facts of twenty years. The framing of the story is gloriously classical: a writer looking for Baranov is conveyed to Baranov’s house in the woods at night, and Baranov tells his story by the fireside.

“Ah, Baranov,” he said, “there you are, the Wizard of the Kremlin, Putin’s Rasputin. Do you know what people are saying about your ‘sovereign democracy’? That it is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”

da Empoli is a political scientist, and he provides an interesting angle on Russia as humiliated by the Yeltsin years, feeling like it was colonised by the West in those years, and Russia as a country of extremes. From one perspective, they even did laissez-faire capitalism bigger than anyone else. It’s funny, scary, completely fascinating and a little melancholy. Recommended without reservation.

There’s a film adaptation coming, with Paul Dano as Baranov and Jude Law as Putin.

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)

CONNECTED:

• THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, Guiliano da Empoli