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From that point on, Limonov was to be Savenko’s nom de plume and nom de guerre; there was no looking back. There was no more Savenko.
This moment may hold a key to much that is seemingly inexplicable in Limonov’s career — much that may strike the western eye as a blatant contradiction. Take the rabid nationalist’s philo-Semitism:
There are a lot of things you can hold against Eduard, but not anti-Semitism. It has nothing to do with his moral elevation, nor with his historical consciousness — like most Russians who perpetuate the memory of their 20 million war dead, he couldn’t care less about the Shoah — but with a sort of snobbery. For him the fact that your average Russian — and even more your average Ukrainian — is an anti-Semite is the best reason not to be one yourself. Looking askance at Jews is something for blinkered, dull-witted rednecks, something for a Savenko.
There are indeed a lot of things one can hold against Eduard: he is, in all likelihood, a war criminal, and is currently doing his — thankfully inadequate — best to foment further destabilisation in the east of Ukraine. He is a narcissist, perhaps a genuine psychopath. But this intrepid adventurer, this self-invented man of action, this writer of stirring, provocative, hilarious and often heartbreaking autobiographical ‘novels’, is also a representative figure (dare I say hero?) of our time.
He is an unreconstructed romantic, embodying the best and, largely, the worst ideals associated with the type. No wonder he fascinates Carrère, who is, for all his talent and achievement, an essentially average man, a bourgeois. Carrère toys with right-wing ideology in youth: Limonov leads a nationalist party. Carrère sets off for Java with his ravishing girlfriend in order to avoid military service, and returns to Paris alone, with a bad novel and two crates of unsellable bathing suits; Limonov sets off for New York from the Soviet Union, knowing he can never return, loses the woman of his dreams, roams the streets, takes on odd and demeaning jobs, makes love to a black man at a playground, and pursues fame as a writer without ever wavering, until he finally makes it. Carrère spends a year writing a book about Werner Herzog, has the subject call it ‘bullshit’ to his face, and continues to interview the man, swallowing his pride and masking his devastation; Limonov never misses an opportunity to bite at the heels of better-regarded poets and authors, like Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, and punches a British writer in the face for defaming the Soviet Union.
Limonov has lived a life so thoroughly informed by romantic ideals that it verges on a parody of those ideals, and Carrère — weaned, like Savenko, on Dumas’s Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo — explores its allure, its bathos, and its frightening consequences.
And this, in turn, allows Carrère to explore something even more consequential: the resonance, though far from perfect harmony, between Limonov’s peculiar ideology and that of the current Russian administration, as well as his intuitive, deeply felt sense of what has motivated Russia’s retreat from the West, of the spirit of resentment and revanchism that determines the nation’s stance in the world.
Those interested in understanding the forces at play in Putin’s Russia and on its periphery can learn a lot from Carrère’s insightful reflections on Limonov’s unlikely but (mostly) true story.
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