Daniel Arjona Madrid

Madrid

Updated Tuesday, February 20, 2024-03:57

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Something clicks in the old man's unstitched brain and it seems as if the soul once again takes possession of the body. But

it is a domain as fragile as it is ephemeral

. He asks about the day's agenda and his faithful caregiver tells him that now it's time to shower and get dressed, because he is going to receive a visit from the new president. "The new president? Am I not the president?" "Not anymore, Vladimir Vladimirovich."

An unexpected gust of icy wind has turned the pages of the calendar at full speed and we find ourselves in the future, 20 years from now. In a luxurious dacha that stands surrounded by a birch forest southwest of Moscow, an old man remembers his life in flashes of memory, "like a cluster of shooting stars illuminating for a few moments a dying and dark galaxy." While the once all-powerful Putin languishes in his gilded haven, safe from gossip, his circle of upstarts

steals his immense fortune

from him while he reigns in a Russia awash in corruption and violence.

To know more

Culture.

Robert D. Kaplan: "If Putin falls tomorrow, Russia will continue to be a problem because Russia is eternal"

  • Editor: LUIS ALEMANY Madrid

Robert D. Kaplan: "If Putin falls tomorrow, Russia will continue to be a problem because Russia is eternal"

History.

Antony Beevor: "Putin's behavior is more like Hitler's than Stalin's"

  • Editor: BORJA MARTÍNEZ Madrid

Antony Beevor: "Putin's behavior is more like Hitler's than Stalin's"

«The dacha had originally been state property, but Vladimir had added it to his long list of residences at some point during his long chain of presidential terms. To tell the truth, like so many other things in Russia - perhaps the entire country itself - no one knew who the true owner was, although, on closer inspection, it may have been even more accurate and prudent to observe that

the ownership contract did not necessarily coincide with the reality

".

Michael Honig is the nom de plume under which a renowned British doctor hides. In fact, his previous novel,

Goldblatt's Descent

(2023), described the vicissitudes of a doctor trying to survive the

decline of the NHS, the United Kingdom's social security system

. Honig now publishes a very different title in Spanish, but where survival is also at stake.

The Senility of Vladimir P.

, (Libros del Kultrum), a dystopian satire, as twilight as it is hilarious, imagines the alienated future of the iron leader in a country devastated by a clique of profiteers and criminals. It is a book whose original version in English dates back to 2016 and is, therefore, prior to the invasion of Ukraine, but whose predictions sound extremely close. And plausible.

Served by a certain Sheremetev,

the last honest man in the country

, Putin's memories unravel in fits and starts from his beginnings as a KGB agent to his becoming the new tsar of all the Russias. Thus two apparently dissimilar motives merge that, however, illuminate each other: accommodating moral complicity, on the one hand; and widespread palliative care in an increasingly aging society, on the other.

As hallucinatory

flashbacks

follow one another, Honig summarizes three decades of despotic power marked by the man who originally seemed like a friend of the West and ended up mutating into its greatest nemesis. Rigged elections, murders of journalists, imprisonment of opponents and dissidents, disappearance of billions from the budgets for the Olympic Games and the World Cup, endless wars. And all while

he is pursued by an olfactory specter of the Chechen terrorists

he threatened to kill "in the bathroom." He even admits to ordering "a bomb or two in an apartment building" to justify the complete destruction of Grozny. His obsessions, like litanies, fly over the entire plot of

The Senility of Vladimir P

.: "Only a strong man can govern Russia", "all the problems in Russia are the fault of the West."

The faithful Sheremetev, nicknamed "Saint Nicholas", is a man of such probity that he is a suspect in the gang of thieves that surrounds the senile Putin. Therefore, he finds himself involved in his own moral dilemma when his nephew's life is at risk if he He is not able to get $300,000. It will take a huge bribe to buy it. The

boss 's jailers

will never believe that someone who works for "the biggest thief in Russia" can be satisfied with the meager salary of a nurse

. In this situation, he is advised by the other great figure of the novel: Stepanin, the irascible and drunken dacha cook, who seeks to make enough money from the situation to pay the bills for his villa in Cyprus and open his own restaurant in Moscow.

The literature that drinks from the endless spring that flows from the figure of the ruthless and megalomaniac Russian dictator is already very abundant. From the prophetic

Moscow 2042

of the

dissident and exiled writer Vladimir Voinovich

, who already in 1986, with the USSR still standing, imagined a future Russia led by a former KGB spy who had been stationed in Germany, to recent spy novels like those of Robert Littell, Henry Porter or Jason Mathews.

In Russia itself, satire is a much more dangerous profession than in the West. Dissident journalist

Oleg Kashin

wrote his own dystopian novel in 2023 titled

Fardwor, Russia!

, in which scientists come up with a growth serum that they apply to oil oligarchs. Shortly after delivering the book to his publishers, Kashin was savagely beaten and nearly died.

In one of the images of the past that his novel weaves, a young Vladimir Putin has just exhibited his power before an incredulous tycoon who asks him, desperately: "Do

you really think that this is the way to save Russia?"

Let everything be in your hands and in those of your KGB thugs? "Do you think it's better to leave the task to you and the rest of your delinquent thugs?" the satrap replies without losing his smile.