Eduard Limonov: It’s Me, Eddy, Glagol Press.

This is the foreword to a 1991 title from the Moscow publisher Glagol — the first edition of Eduard Limonov’s novel, It’s Me, Eddy (Eto ia, Edichka) to appear in Russia. It is interesting as an attempt to package an intensely homoerotic literary work for a broad 1990s Russian readership, and also as a reintroduction of Limonov — well known in the West as an author of at least semi-autobiographical homoerotic literature — to a broad public in 1990s Russia, where he will soon achieve notoriety as a nationalist political figure.

The book, in the original Russian, was first released in New York by Index Publishers in 1979. Limonov was then an émigré poet who had broken into the “tamizdat” scene of foreign publications of Russian literary works unpublishable in the USSR. The book features a central figure who shares Limonov’s first name and his experience of struggling for survival as a Russian émigré in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Parts of the novel are intensely homoerotic, portraying the protagonist’s numerous sexual encounters with other men. Homosexuality was a salient feature of the protagonist for the novel’s first Western-European translators in the 1980s; translations of the novel into French, Italian, and Dutch rendered the title as The Russian Poet Likes Big Black Guys.

After his return to Russia in the 1990s Limonov was packaging himself for the broadest possible audience, and in this process emphatically distanced himself from the bisexual protagonist of the novel and from the novel itself. In his rise to a national political figure with a militant nationalist platform, Limonov will vehemently deny that the homosexual episodes in his novel were autobiographical, and will try to pass his protagonist’s homosexuality off as nothing more than a literary device — a trope to signal the depth of his degradation. He will present Eddy’s descent into homosexuality as a symptom of the character’s loss of his Russian identity, his moral decomposition in the alien Western environment of New York City.

After Glagol, founded in 1990, published Edichka, it made a name for itself as Russia’s first gay press, releasing Russian translations of Western works by LGBTQ authors, as well as books by Russian LGBTQ writers and books on LGBTQ themes. This foreword to the Glagol edition of Edichka is written by the press’s founding editor Alexander Shatalov. Himself a gay man, in this introduction of the newly returned émigré Limonov to a 1990s Russian readership, Shatalov avoids direct reference to the novel’s prominent homoerotic dimensions and wavers on the extent to which the book’s central figure represents Limonov himself. This equivocation is, perhaps, representative of a tendency of Glagol, first observed by sociologist Laurie Essig, to publish books whose characters did not have Western-style LGBTQIA identities. Instead, these figures indulged in same-sex erotic behavior as part of hidden second lives. For Essig, this type of fiction telegraphed a broader late-Soviet and early post-Soviet trend of insulating homosexual activity from public or social identity and resisting contemporary Western conventions around LGBTQ sexual identities. Shatalov’s foreword presents the late-Soviet encounter with American culture in Eddy’s émigré experience in New York as ultimately fortifying his Russianness and steeling his resolve not to be absorbed into Western (American) culture. Restoration of a distinct Russian national identity for Eddy seems to implicitly extend to Limonov. The claim of an elemental Russianness on behalf of the up-and-coming nationalist political figure that was Eddy’s creator seems to dictate that figure’s disassocation from the novel’s bisexual protagonist, and in general to force homoerotic experience into subtext in the foreword itself.