A knife-wielding poet, a lover of beautiful women, a political troublemaker, a novelist who predicted his own immortality — Eduard Limonov has long been cast in many roles. To his roster, he can now add the honour of being played by Ben Whishaw in a new film, Limonov: The Ballad. Yet this Cannes-premiering biopic is not without controversy: where the creators of the film saw “greatness”, and The Guardian identified “an exhilarating, alarming look… at the Russian soul”, Ukrainians have decried an attempt to whitewash a man who had for years justified war on their country.
But Limonov’s story can’t be captured by Manichean binaries. It is more a profound tale of the inevitable downfall of the bohemian contrarian.
A poet courting fame through infamy, Limonov rebelled against conventions and revelled in being vilified. His heroes were not Russian tsars or religious zealots but the Sex Pistols and Yukio Mishima; his writing style was more influenced by Louis-Ferdinand Céline than Leo Tolstoy. “I did not want to play their game. I wanted, as in Russia, to be outside the game, or if possible, if I could, to play against them,” said the narrator of his first novel, It’s Me, Eddie, which remains his most important work.
Written in the United States in 1976, the book would be considered autofiction in today’s terms, based as it is on Limonov’s life as a welfare-relying immigrant in New York. The narrator of this picaresque tale is resentful towards what he sees as a racist and corrupt country and is driven by dreams of sex with both men and women. Writing of this desire in disturbing detail, Limonov’s ability to ditch the antiquated style of classical Russian literature would prove scandalous in his native land. Decades later, a Russian activist would famously say that she learnt to perform oral sex by reading Limonov.
Born into the family of a low-level NKVD (future KGB) officer during the Second World War, Eduard Savenko grew up in Kharkiv in Soviet Ukraine. A friend of petty thieves, the young Eduard won a poetry competition in 1957. He would choose Limonov for a pseudonym and conquer the local unofficial poetry scene before setting his sights on Moscow where he would begin to earn a living as a poet.
Limonov was forced out of Russia in 1974 when he refused to become an informant for the KGB. He migrated to New York where he rallied against Western hypocrisy and free-market capitalism, on the one hand, and the Soviet system, on the other — both to him were equally oppressive. While more and more ordinary Russians were realising their country was a failed state, Limonov wasn’t impressed by the staunch anti-communism of dissidents back home either. The émigré Limonov was, instead, developing a revanchist nostalgia whose forbidden appeal would soon conquer masses.
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