Emmanuel Carrère: a poet and psychopath doing his best to further destabilise Ukraine

If Eduard Limonov, the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s utterly engrossing biographical ‘novel’, hadn’t invented himself, Carrère would have had to invent him. This is not to say that Limonov, one of the most colourful and controversial characters to have emerged on the Russian literary and political landscapes in the last half century, is a liar. Quite the contrary. At any given moment — be he an adolescent hoodlum in the industrial Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the 1950s and 1960s, a promising poet in Moscow in the relatively peaceful but stultifying Brezhnev years, a resentful down-and-out-émigré memoirist in punk-era New York, a mercenary with the Serbs at Sarajevo in the ugliest moments of the Yugoslav wars, or the leader of a pseudo-fascist political party of ‘National Bolsheviks’, hell-bent on restoring Russia’s former glory and willing to serve a stint in prison to prove his resolve — Limonov is fiercely committed to his role, inhabiting it completely.

But it is very much a role, and one he had selected before he had a name for it, when he was still a young scrapper named Eduard Savenko, son of a middling KGB colonel, deciding between a life of crime and one of poetry. As Carrère reports, one of the pivotal moments in his subject’s life occurred at a salon for the underground poets and artists of Kharkiv, hosted by Limonov’s soon-to-be common-law wife, Anna Rubinstein:

One night, the little group assembled at Anna’s place to play at renaming themselves. Eduard Savenko [becomes] Ed Limonov, a tribute to his bellicose humour, because limon means ‘lemon’, and limonka is slang for a kind of hand grenade. While the others will drop those pseudonyms, he’ll keep his. Even his name he wants to owe to no one but himself.