Vladimir Putin’s Reading List

While the world awaits confirmation as to whether Vladimir Putin will challenge, or push aside, his protégé Dmitry Medvedev and run for a third presidential term, we’ve been enjoying the odd and extensive Q. & A. that Gayne C. Young, a high-school English teacher and contributor to Outdoor Life magazine, managed to get with Putin, in which the Russian leader talks about America’s history of manly Presidents (he points to Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama), environmental preservation, Christianity, and some of his favorite books:

I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors.

Later in the interview, Young follows up on the Hemingway connection, introducing some of his own favorite outdoors literature—including the hunting writers Peter Capstick, Robert Ruark, and Jim Corbett. Here Putin turns professorial, and slightly scolding:

It seems to me that we have a slightly different understanding of the outdoors concept…. I would not be wrong, I believe, if I were to say that we have rather different views even on Hemingway. It seems to me that the book you enjoy most is Green Hills of Africa. As for me, it is A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.

Putin places his sentiment with the somber and wounded among Hemingway’s protagonists—Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan, the old fisherman Santiago—though notably he leaves out Jake Barnes, the conspicuously wounded lead character in “The Sun Also Rises.” Putin rounds out his reading list by recommending two Russian titles to an American audience: Turgenev’s “A Sportsman’s Sketches” and the short stories of the nature writer Mikhail Prishvin.

Young’s surprising exclusive emerged from previous blog posts he had written for Outdoor Life, including one in which he wrote about the “man crush” he had developed for Putin. Soon Young heard from the Russian Embassy, which arranged for Young to deliver questions to Putin, who later delivered an eight-thousand-word response, much of which was cut to yield the final version. (In an odd tidbit, Ketchum, the public-relations firm that often represents Russia and helped arranged the interview, shares the name of the town in Idaho where Hemingway lived out his final years—fishing, hunting, and, finally, killing himself.)

Perhaps Putin and his handlers misunderstood the reach and scope that Outdoor Life has in the United States, but more likely the interview represents a rather shrewd p.r. move. Where else in the American press would Putin be given space to demur at such questions as “Are you the coolest man in politics?” And the venue and subject play up Putin’s particular strengths in the West, burnished by the stagey iconography of a rugged, resolute, and often shirtless outdoorsman. Putin the benevolent naturalist is a more appealing character than Putin the ruthless and endlessly ambitious politician—a man who has overseen years of civil-rights abuses and crackdowns on the press and run a government that displays an often blatant disregard for established laws. (It’s also more appealing than Putin the entertainer, based on the YouTube video that captures his mangling of “Blueberry Hill.”)

At the end of the interview Putin offers a view of life by pointing to the nineteenth-century writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and his fable about a fish who hides beneath stones, fearful of danger. The moral, per Putin: “One can truly enjoy his or her life only while experiencing it, and it is inevitably related to a certain level of risk.” Finally, then, this is the projected Putin packaged for America: the man of action, the teller of fables and myths.