Vladimir Putin answered a question about the book he is currently reading

How is Lermontov close to the Russian President?

During the “Direct Line with Vladimir Putin,” the head of state was not asked a single question related to culture. But they asked: “What are you reading?” VVP tried to laugh it off, saying, “I’ll re-read the Criminal Code now,” and then admitted: “There’s a volume of Lermontov in the bedside table, I love him… He was a brilliant young man. I’m interested in how the brilliant people of that time thought.”

Perhaps it was an impromptu, but by coincidence the named author turned out, like many pre-revolutionary writers, to be a Russian officer and participant in military campaigns, and not an “armchair writer.”

Mikhail Yuryevich, as you know, was a hussar, served in the Caucasus, and specifically in 1840 he participated in a bloody battle on the territory of Chechnya, near the Valerik River.

Trying to figure out which edition of Lermontov ends up in the hands of Vladimir Vladimirovich in the evenings is hardly an effective task. The largest circulation was the collected works of the classic in two volumes, published by the Pravda plant – the circulation was 1 million 400 thousand pieces, so anything can happen.

But Putin said the word “volume,” which is how a small book of poems is usually called, so it’s unlikely that the Russian leader is reading “A Hero of Our Time” or plays like “Masquerade.”

Most likely, Putin turns to lyrical and military poems, including the immortal “Borodino”, short poems – you can bet a bottle of champagne that the poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus” is purely thematically close to him. The President sees himself as a successor to the great deeds of the past, which means that the conquest of the Caucasus in the first half of the 19th century and the second Chechen campaign (CTO in Chechnya) at the turn of the millennium automatically “rhyme” in his mind.

How else could Mikhail Yuryevich bribe? The “cult of the Kremlin” is atypical for the century before last. A special reverence for the ancient heart of Moscow arose already under the USSR – in the Russian Empire the capital was different, and the Earth did not begin on Red Square. But here we read from Lermontov:

“Who saw the Kremlin at golden hour in the morning,

When there is fog over the city,

When between the temples with proud simplicity,

Like a king, does the giant tower turn white?”