Vladimir Putin’s Dead Poets Society

“Putin apparently decided recently that it was time for him to take over literature, and he reached for the only kind of literary legitimacy he understands: the great names.” Masha Gessen visits the University of the Friendship of the Peoples in Moscow for the All-Russian Literary Gathering, packed with namesakes and relations of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhentsyn, etc.