The Book of Genesis begins by asserting, in the most fundamental way, that when God says a thing, it happens: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” We mortals may or may not be true to our word, but what makes the divine the divine is this complete lack of daylight between word and deed.

THE INFERNAL LIBRARY: ON DICTATORS, THE BOOKS THEY WROTE, AND OTHER CATASTROPHES OF LITERACY by Daniel Kalder Henry Holt and Co., 400 pp., $32

Authoritarian leaders have long aspired to this godlike union of word and action. A dictator does not deal in facts and reason, but rather in the brute force that makes his word law, that turns each and every utterance into concrete action, unencumbered by anything but his own will. It’s there in the very term itself: dictator, one who dictates, one who merely has to speak in order to bring about change, so strong is the bond between proclamation and action.

That dream echoes through a line like this: “The Word is the most sacred gift God gave to human beings”—a line that comes not from the Bible or the Quran, but from a book that appeared in every mosque, library, and government building in Turkmenistan: The Rukhnama. Written by Turkmenbashi, the dictator who ruled the country from 1985 until his death in 2006, The Rukhnama is among the most bizarre of literary productions: It grew initially out of a need to gather up old folk traditions of Turkmenistan in a hope to reestablish its identity in the waning days of the Soviet Union, but grew into a remarkable testament of the ego and delusion of its author.

Constructing an elaborate cult of personality, Turkmenbashi banned gold teeth, lip syncing, ballet, opera, the circus, and smoking. He renamed January after himself and renamed bread after his mother. And he renamed September after his great book, stating that any one who read it start to finish three times would be guaranteed entrance to Heaven.

Encountering The Rukhnama inspired the journalist Daniel Kalder to explore other works of authoritarian literature, resulting in The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy. Surveying the literary output of leaders from Lenin to Kim Jong-il, Kalder asks why so many totalitarians dabble in literature. Alongside Turkmenbashi’s sui generis “masterpiece” Kalder considers the dense treatises of Lenin, the aphorisms of Chairman Mao, and the romances of Saddam Hussein, which he was still writing and rushing to print even as U.S. forces were invading his country in 2003.