After death – to publish: Limonov’s farewell book

Limonov the writer and Limonov the politician overwrite Limonov the poet. Although his first and most famous novel – “It’s me – Eddie” (1976) – he wrote in New York just in the status of a star of the poetic underground. Limonov did not become a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, he himself, like a lot of unrecognized poets, retyped his collections on a typewriter, but distributed them for money – which stood out against the background of less resourceful comrades in samizdat.

A heavy emigrant lot forced me to switch to prose – it turned out to be more difficult to attach poetry in capitalist America than under Soviet censorship. Brand envy also played its role in the development of Limonov the prose writer. In The Book of the Dead (2000), he admits that he then despaired of beating Brodsky and decided to completely abandon rhyming. But he didn’t give up. He wrote little by little in parallel with novels, short stories, articles. And once in the early 2000s in the Lefortovo detention center, the muse no longer cheated (in 2001, Limonov was detained for possession of weapons, was sentenced to four years in a penal colony, but in 2003 he was released on parole).