M. Gessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…When you met Putin, what was that like? What was your impression, viscerally? That was bizarre. Some history: I met Putin about six months after publishing an unauthorized biography of him that came out in about 20 languages and became a best seller in many of them. And he didn’t know about the book. That was really interesting because it’s obvious why he didn’t know about the book. In order for him to know about the book, someone would have to tell him about the book. [laughter] And nobody wanted to be that person. But my experience of meeting him — he called me and said that he wanted to meet for a different reason. It had nothing to do with the book. I couldn’t tell anybody about it because I was afraid of having the meeting canceled. I was in Prague that day. I texted my editor in New York and said, “I have to talk to you. Get on GChat.” She got on GChat, and I said, “Putin just called me, and he wants to meet.” She said, “Well, I’m really scared for you.” I’m like, “Are you kidding?” She said, “How are you feeling?” I said, “Well, I would be more excited if it had been Perelman, but this is really good. ” Perelman was the first person that I wrote a book about who didn’t talk to me, and Putin was the second. It was the sense of meeting a character from your book because the experience of writing nonfiction isn’t that different from writing fiction, in the sense that you have all this available information. Then you construct a character to the best of your ability based on the available information. At that point, I felt like I had constructed him. It was like getting a phone call from the protagonist of your novel who says, “I want to meet.” Then you really want to see whether you got it right. Part of me wanted him to be exactly like the person in the book, and part of me wanted him to be different. Part of me wanted to make a discovery, to have him be more interesting, more deep, more human because the guy in my book was pretty two dimensional. And he was that. He was completely two dimensional — [laughter] — exactly the guy in my book, which was both gratifying and disappointing. Why did Garry Kasparov fail at Russian politics and overthrowing Putin?…

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