Rome, 20 May 2024 – “He was not a novelist: he only knew how to tell his life, but his life was exciting and he told it well”. With these words Emmanuel Carrère introduces Eduard Veniaminovič Savenko in “Limonov” (Adelphi, 2012), the editorial case on which the film of the same name was based Kirill Serebrennikov presented these days at the Cannes film festival.
Savenko, nicknamed “Limonov” for his harsh and explosive writing style (in reference to the M26, the “lemon bomb”) is not a fictional character. Died in March 2020, “he was a hooligan in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, a bum and then a servant of a billionaire in Manhattan, a fashionable writer in Paris, a soldier lost in the Balkans” we read in the first pages of biographical novel signed Carrère. Acclaimed by critics and readers alike, the book topped the charts in France, Russia and Italy – as reported by Stefano De Luca, Alan Di Forte and Chiara Palmisciano in “Limonov. Analysis of an editorial case” (Oblique Studio, 2015) both for the peculiarity of the story and for the way in which it was received by the public.
First published in France In the 2011, “Limonov” is the result of years of writing. It is a captivating, bitter and surprising work, a black and adventure novel, built on several levels: the Savenko’s storythe history of Russia since the Second World War and theCarrère’s experience, which combines personal memories with the narration of facts, giving the work autobiographical traits that were crucial in determining its success. There was an intersection between the lives of the two writers, characterized by more coincidences without which perhaps the million-copy novel would not have been written. Carrère discovered Savenko by chance, thanks to his mother – the illustrious historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, specialized in studies on Russia – who had his first book at home, “The Russian poet prefers great blacks” (Frassinelli, 1985), where the author recounted his experience in New York. He was immediately fascinated by it and decided to contact the Russian writer, who was in Paris at the time, to interview him. Thus began a series of sporadic meetings between the two, until Savenko returned to Russia in 1991, following the fall of the USSR. Carrère tried to follow his story from afar, but when he was arrested in 2001, under charges of terrorism and arms trafficking, he lost sight of him. It is again by chance that the two met again, in 2006when Carrère was in Fly to collect testimonies about the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, killed because she was against Putin’s regime. This is how Carrère’s novel opens: in the midst of the crowd gathered for the fourth commemoration of the massacre in the Dubrovka theatre, he recognizes Limonov’s face.
During his stay in Moscow, the French author spent two weeks with Savenko, interviewing him and observing him in his daily life. He combined this with reading his books, essential for the reconstruction of such a singular character. He soon realized that such a story would arouse the most diverse reactions. Limonov is not alone controversial, but it seems to incorporate several different people within it: he declared himself a fascist, but at the same time “he sported a Red Army officer’s jacket”; leader of the National Bolshevik Party, which he founded; but also a poet and writer of millions of copies, who dreamed of a democratic revolution in Putin’s Russia. A character for everyone and no one: Carrère chooses to tell his story without judging it, “suspending judgement”, and thus managing to transform the telling of a personal story into a universal experience. And this is precisely the reason for his success. However inconsistent, “sometimes moving, sometimes repugnant”, Limonov in Carrère’s prose is never mediocre: “What I wanted to put above all at the center of the novel is the temptation to lead an adventurous life, a heroic existence, a temptation that it captures us all when we are young, but which we almost always abandon – the author himself explained in an interview for “Il Manifesto” – Limonov, on the other hand, remained faithful to this ideal”.
