What Vladimir Putin’s taste in literature tells us about the man

What exactly is going on in Vladimir Putin’s head? It’s the question everybody in the world is asking, and all the answers seem to contradict each other. Is he driven by religious zeal or extreme patriotism? Does he want to reunite the USSR or does he see himself as a 21st-century Tsar re-establishing the Russian Empire? Is he a master strategist or a gung-ho leap-before-you-look adventurer?

What I would really like to do right now is take a look at Putin’s personal library. It’s a person’s books – especially the particularly dog-eared ones – that are the best clue to their character.

Alas, we’ll probably have to wait several decades (and that’s if Putin spares us) for scholars to sort through his library. But one day we may be able to read the Putin equivalent of Timothy W Ryback’s fascinating 2009 book Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life.

Ryback read as many of the books Hitler owned as he could, seeking out his actual copies wherever possible and making note of his marginalia (and occasionally coming across small wiry moustache hairs). He was able to pinpoint the course of the development of much of Hitler’s thinking, including his anti-Semitism – which seems not to have been something he felt viscerally from an early age but was won round to by his reading.

As well as books on military matters and philosophy, Hitler owned several adventure stories by the likes of J Fenimore Cooper (of The Last of the Mohicans fame) and our own GA Henty, author of such stirring tales for boys as True to the Old Flag and No Surrender! – perhaps, in a modest way, doing something to inform the Führer’s simplistic spin on the notions of honour and patriotism.

From the little we know of Putin’s reading, he shares Hitler’s taste for tales of adventure. In 2011 he – somewhat bizarrely – agreed to give comprehensive answers to a set of questions sent to him by a Texan high-school English teacher called Gayne C Young, who published the interview in Outdoor Life magazine: the result was an insight into his reading preferences.

“My fondness for the outdoors, like that of many other people, has its roots in my youth and, particularly, in the books I’ve read,” Putin declared. “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.”

Exactly how much of his “inner self” have these books shaped? Despite his obvious enthusiasm for accumulating worldly goods, there may well be a part of Putin that has absorbed Jack London’s belief that civilisation is a sham and we are healthier and freer the closer we live to the state of being an animal; perhaps his seeming willingness to ramp up the risk of a nuclear winter reflects some measure of self-disgust about how cosseted he has become. On the other hand, there is something very Jules Verne-esque in his lust for technological supremacy; as he boasts about the potentially world-ending weapons in his arsenal, he clearly sees himself as having to some extent conquered nature.

As for Hemingway, Putin declares The Old Man and the Sea to be one of his favourites (no doubt the news that university students in Scotland have had to be warned that the book contains “graphic fishing scenes” will further confirm his belief in the milksop-like state of Western society). Hemingway may possibly have spied for the Soviets in the 1940s, but one suspects it’s the elemental struggles of his heroes rather than his politics that appeal to Putin.

Not noticeably a team player, Putin may have been influenced by his reading to cast himself in the role of the cussed hero fighting alone against incredible odds – and these days, his love of the outdoors hampered by his alleged ill health and terror of catching Covid, and his thirst for adventure having to be vicariously satisfied by conducting a war from the comfort of the Kremlin, he may still see himself as the stubborn Hemingway-hero type who knows better than everybody else and therefore has no need to waste time canvassing the viewpoints of his staff.

In the end there may be rather too close a connection between the action-man Putin who likes to be photographed showing off his torso while riding and fishing and the suited and booted Putin at his desk: nothing is more important than showing everybody how tough and self-reliant he is. There’s more than a touch of Hemingway in that, although it didn’t end well for him: despairing of his waning strength in his sixties, Hemingway shot himself. Let us hope Putin doesn’t feel that launching a nuclear war is a preferable option to advancing decrepitude.

Later on in the Outdoor Life interview, Putin expresses a fondness for the works of Ivan Turgenev. “His well-known A Sportsman’s Sketches has been a favourite book of Russian hunting fans for more than a century, which reflects in general the philosophy of hunting in Russia, where the mere process, the fact that you are close to nature and communicate with people, matters – not the outcome.

“It does not contain any passionate chases or vivid description of hunting trophies. The main character, in a simple but picturesque and very sympathetic way, tells stories about people he met while hunting, and their lives. They are a sort of sketches on Russia’s heartland of the mid-19th century that provide food for thought and allow us to see our country, its traditions and national psychology in a new light.”

Again, this suggests Putin has a somewhat ambivalent view of the progress of civilisation. Living simply, being close to nature: Russia was perhaps better off as a peasant society. Certainly, he seems keenly aware of a sense of continuity between past and present, which perhaps goes some way to explaining his bizarre obsession with re-establishing old borders.

The mind boggles at the thought of what the gentle, spiritual Turgenev would have thought about being cited by Putin. One suspects Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – equally spiritual but in a rather more turbulent way might have had more of a qualified admiration for Putin. They would certainly have been fascinated by him.

Putin has often spoken about his own admiration for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. One supposes that he is keen on Tolstoy’s notion that, as Natasha’s spontaneous dance in War and Peace reveals, it is possible even for an aristocrat to commune with the true peasant soul of Russia. No doubt he can thus console himself that even a man who favours tailored Kiton and Brioni suits can still commune with his ancestral roots when need be.

In his book Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin (2018), however, the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff is sceptical of Putin’s assertions of his fondness for the Russian classics: “Putin has deployed such repeated references judiciously, but too mechanically and too circumstantially for them to appear profound”. Eltchaninoff notes that Putin has no settled view of, say, Dostoevsky’s philosophy, employing his words to argue for peace in a united Europe back in 2006 but, in his more bullish recent moods, co-opting him as a fierce critic of pro-Western Russians.

Putin does not, in general, seem to take imaginative writers very seriously. It is true that in 2013 he oversaw the inauguration of a Literary Assembly, a successor to Stalin’s Union of Soviet Writers; but there’s no evidence that he shares the old poet Stalin’s belief in the vital importance of encouraging – and if that doesn’t work, forcing – creative writers to pen propaganda. To be blunt, he doesn’t seem to think writers are worth shooting.

Perhaps the most telling thing Putin's library could reveal to us is how many of his books remain unread. We will see how deeply his values are embedded in his reading: self-interest may yet prove a stronger impulse than the urge to be a Hemingway hero or the man responsible for Russia’s spiritual rebirth.