Word: limonov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...RUSSIA, if you tell someone your troubles and then disregard his advice, your advisor will probably shrug and say. "It's your life." In this country, says Russian emigre Edward Limonov, we have no patience for anyone but ourselves. Without even listening, we use the formula "that's your problem," which the author calls "the most murderous expression since the origin of mankind...
...wonder that Limonov, who left Russia for the West in 1974, would notice such a distinction between cultures--for him, life is one big problem. It's Me, Eddie, Limonov's "fictional memoir" of a debauched, desperate Russian poet on welfare in New York City, was designed to shock the emigre community when it first appeared in 1974. Just translated into English, the book aims its bitter criticism at all the things that made Limonov's life miserable--that is, anything that can be cursed or sexually degraded. Naturally, his adopted homeland comes in for more than its fair share...
Such judgments lose much of their potency when delivered by a narrator whose life centers around probing the limits of alcoholism and sexual perversion. Obscenities, apparently varied and clever in the original Russian, flow steadily and unendingly through Limonov's rocky prose. These have been translated with a singular lack of inspiration into either "fuck" or "shit," and serve rather to dull one's sensibilities than to shock them. Likewise, Eddie's staggering feats of drinking become banal with repetition. Thankfully, vodka does not interfere with the lucidity of either his narration or his pain. Although he describes...
...LIMONOV, however, is writing not about losing a wife but about losing a country. Elena's defection spurs Eddie's fantasies and seductions, the meat of the novel. Yet it is his move to America that gives her the freedom to leave him in the first place. Thus she becomes a symbol for the losses the exile must suffer in his adopted home. As the imaginary object for all Eddie's nostalgic yearnings for the old country. Elena is naturally less wonderful in reality than in memory...
...language and so his trade. In the Soviet Union he could at least publish a few underground volumes, but in America he loses his voice altogether. Eddie's resentment toward the Soviet dissidents who urge others to emigrate without ever having been in the West themselves is, then, understandable. Limonov repeatedly attacks that paragon of dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for instigating Eddie's immigration. For Eddie, Solzhenitsyn is a propaganda artist. In one scene, "the prophet" talks on television; while frustrated Eddie and Elena make their big statement by having intercourse in front...