Authenticity, Camera, Action

Abstract

?or Eduard Limonov, the “stolid, bourgeois, fat-assed word ‘exile’”¹ summed up the world of Russian literature abroad in the years following his departure from the Soviet Union in 1974. Convinced that the success of his contemporaries, including such figures as Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, could be attributed to Western readers’ anti- Soviet sentiments and pedestrian tastes, rather than to the writers’ literary achievements, Limonov took pains to disassociate himself from personal and semantic associations with exiles of any kind.² The émigré literary milieu was for him itself a “kind of exile,”³ and throughout his six years in New York (1974–1980) and ten in Paris (1981–1991) Limonov worked establish himself outside of its circle. In presenting himself as an antipode to Brodsky, estranged from Russians abroad and American society as a whole, Limonov implicated himself in modernist formations of exile that privilege detachment and alienation as conditions for legitimating his art. Emphasizing his efforts to learn English and French, insisting that he was a “normal writer” read by “normal people” (read: nonémigrés), and boasting that he lived exclusively on the royalties he earned from the sales of his books,⁴ the Limonov of the 1970s and 1980s sought recognition in his identity as writer, free from any (acknowledged) literary influences, and without national or political affiliation.