Political Fictionality: Vladislav Surkov and the Rise of the Authorial State

Abstract This article introduces the concept of political fictionality as a theoretical framework for analyzing the convergence of literary authorship and political power in Russia during the Putin era, using Vladislav Surkov—a longtime presidential advisor and ideologue as well as fiction writer under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitskii—as its principal case study. Rather than treating Surkov’s literary and political activities as separate domains, this article argues that they constitute a unified authorial model in which narrative techniques are directly implicated in the workings of political rule. Developed to capture this configuration, political fictionality is defined through four interrelated features: the blurring of boundaries between fictional and political discourse, the use of authorship as a form of political technology, the strategic deployment of ambiguity, and the narrative constitution of reality itself. Drawing on literary theory and ideology critique, this article traces how Surkov’s distinctive synthesis of cynical detachment, postmodern intertextuality, and controlled mystification functions not to subvert the dominant political order but rather to stabilize and legitimize it. His self‐positioning as a “heretical Putinist”—simultaneously insider and outsider, propagandist and aesthete—exemplifies a model of authorship that simulates critical stance while consolidating power. Reading this model against the lineage of the classical realist tradition and Socialist Realism, the article identifies a paradigm shift in ideological production: from mimetic and didactic modes of authority to an operative authorship that seeks to actively intervene in reality. While exemplified through Surkov’s career, the concept of political fictionality points toward broader dynamics of narrative control well beyond the Russian context.