03 December 2012, 10:35 Culture

There will be a gentle leader

“Limonov” by Emmanuel Carrère, a biographical novel on a current topic, is being published in Russian.

Lisa Birger close 100%

A biographical novel by Emmanuel Carrère “Limonov” is being published in Russian, in which the author tries not to be too complimentary towards his hero in order to also become a character in the book.

In intellectual French circles, Limonov has been well known since the time when his novel “The Russian Poet Prefers Big Negroes” was published - this is the title of the book “It’s Me, Eddie” in the French translation. Then “crafty, witty, looking like both a sailor on a spree and a rock star,” as Carrère describes him , Limonov lived in Paris and charmed everyone. But even now he is not forgotten in Europe. True, after he went to the Balkans to fight for the Serbs in the 90s and led the Russian National Bolsheviks, opinions about him changed. Now Limonov, as Carrère formulates the collective perception,

“a disgusting fascist who became the head of a gang of skinheads.” “It’s not that simple,” says Emmanuel Carrère, but from him it’s more of a question than a statement.

Throughout the entire novel, Carrère never undertakes to explain why everyone in Russia likes Limonov so much. The narrator himself doesn’t seem to like the hero at all. And in the architecture of this novel, the narrator becomes the second main character. The typical and boring French bourgeois introduces himself in detail in the book: Emmanuel, a writer, lives in the bohemian 10th arrondissement, his father is an official, his mother is a historian, his wife is a journalist. Limonov needs Carrer for narrative integrity, just as a negative character needs a positive one, and the plot needs a finale.

“I write for French readers, people who are virtuous and do not tolerate violence,” explains the author. Translated into Russian, this means that readers will weigh and evaluate the hero of his novel in accordance with the European scale of values.

They will not be delighted by Limonov's sexual adventures in New York, nor will they find justification for the shelling of Sarajevo during the Yugoslav war.

As it turned out, Carrer's suspicions that his hero could not arouse sympathy among the public were not groundless. In an interview with Gazeta.Ru, the writer admits that the organizers of the largest prize in France, the Goncourt Prize, told him directly: the prize could go to him, but it would never go to “a bastard like Limonov.”

Carrère’s main technique is that he extracts Limonov’s biography from his own books and retells it dryly and boringly, removing the fiction that decorates it or replacing it with his own fiction. It must be said that he had performed this trick before, when in his—excellent, by the way—biography of Philip K. Dick, he recreated the life and phobias of the hero based on his science fiction novels. After this, Limonov must have seemed like a piece of cake to him.

Everything has already been written - all that remains is to see it again. And the author sees a hero who dreams of greatness, but his dreams never come true. In Kharkov youth there is only hopelessness and robbery, in Moscow youth there are only empty drinking sessions, in New York life there are bravado sexual experiments. And even in Paris, where the first semblance of literary success comes to the hero, he mainly runs after Natalya Medvedeva and worries that circulation is not growing.

Limonov, the hero of the novel, boyishly dreams of reaching the top, but most often finds himself at the bottom.

Describing once again how the hero, drunk, lies on the floor on a mattress and imagines his life as a complete failure, the author comes to his senses; it seems to him that such a scene has already happened in the book. And yet he piles them up again and again.

Limonov devoted his life and novels to the mythologization of his own biography. His biographer tries his best to demythologize her back.

In Limonov’s texts, the main thing was and remains the intonation of bravado - either he defeated Brodsky, or overtook Solzhenitsyn, or stood in the vanguard of the world revolution. In Carrer's text, bravado was replaced by boring droning: he envied Brodsky, despised Solzhenitsyn. Watching these two voices struggle in the text throughout the novel is the most fascinating thing about this book.

Sometimes Carrer (or, more correctly, the narrator playing the role of Carrer) even apologizes for the hero. You see, it’s inconvenient for him to write that he divided women into categories: from A to C. After all, this is fascism - the constant building of a hierarchy - who is a boy and who is a rooster. And at the same time, he is able to see in Limonov almost Christian compassion for the weak, for that very category C:

“The fascist Limonov cannot be denied one thing: he always took the side of the minority.

On the side of the thin against the fat, the poor against the rich, on the side of complete scoundrels, of whom there are not many, against honest people, who are still the majority, and no matter how strange his position may seem, it is logical - in any situation, to be on the side of those who is less."

And then you begin to suspect that Limonov is still much more likable to Karrera than he tries to show. The Carrère who is outraged by the hero’s actions remains only a device from the novel. His annoying everydayness and extreme political correctness are needed to justify the choice of the hero to the reader. But that Limonov, who here finds himself in uncomfortable situations with amazing frequency and is more funny than charming, is also a hero of the novel. Only not his own anymore.

The initial impulse of this novel for Carrère is the guess that “in the romantic and dangerous life of the hero, some kind of message is encrypted. Moreover, it concerns not only himself or modern Russia, but also our common history after the Second World War.” And, methodically analyzing Limonov’s plot, exposing the hero as a loser in some ways and funny in others, Carrer discovers a piece of Limonov in each of us: in our ambition, our ambitions, our failures.

Even he himself, a typical French intellectual, is somewhat similar to him. They both wear glasses, for example, and both have been dumped by beautiful women.

This story has two endings. The first is when Carrer comes to Limonov for a farewell interview and he asks why he even took up his biography. You see, the biographer explains, you have an incredibly interesting life.

“It was a shitty life, that’s how it is,” sums up Limonov.

But this is too sad an ending. So it comes with a postscript that they sit down and come up with together. In it, Limonov, in his old age, joins the beggars at Central Asian mosques - without a past, without age, without a name, at once both the rulers of the world and its scum. “Perhaps he’s right: it will suit him,” Carrère agrees. As if not noticing that in this version Limonov is no longer guided by the red-brown ideology, but by the Buddhist sutra, which the author mentions in the novel as the highest wisdom: “A person who considers himself higher, lower or equal to another is far from reality.” The protagonist and antagonist merge, and it is no longer possible to distinguish which of them leads the skinheads and calls for the execution of enemies, and which one admires Solzhentsin and calls for Christian mercy.