Moscow's Glagol Press Publishes Limonov

In 1991, Eduard Limonov’s novel, It’s Me, Eddie (Eto ia, Edichka)— originally written in New York City in 1976—first appeared on Russian soil from Glagol Press, a newcomer on the literary scene founded only in 1990. This edition attempted to package an intensely homoerotic literary work for a broad 1990s Russian readership while simultaneously re-introducing Limonov, well known in the West for his at least semi-autobiographical homoerotic writings, to a public that would soon come to know him, instead, as a far-right nationalist.

 

The book, in the original Russian, was first released in New York by Index Publishers in 1979. At the time, Limonov was an exiled poet breaking into the tamizdat scene, in which foreign presses brought out Russian literary works unpublishable in the USSR. It’s Me, Eddie 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. For the novel’s Western-European translators in the 1980s, homosexuality was a salient feature of the protagonist. Translations of the novel into French, Italian, and Dutch rendered the title as, essentially, The Russian Poet Likes Big Black Guys.

 

After returning to Russia in the 1990s, Limonov reinvented himself for the broadest possible audience, in this process emphatically distancing himself from It’s Me, Eddie’s bisexual protagonist and from the novel itself. In his rise to a national political prominence as a militant nationalist, Limonov would vehemently deny that the homosexual episodes in his novel were autobiographical, instead passing his protagonist’s homosexuality off as nothing more than a literary device. In this post-hoc interpretation, Limonov presented Eddie’s descent into homosexuality as a symptom of the character’s loss of Russian identity, his moral decomposition in the alien Western environment of New York City.

 

After Glagol published It’s Me, Eddie, 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 on LGBTQ themes. The foreword to the Glagol edition of It’s Me, Eddie is by the press’s founding editor, Alexander Shatalov. Himself a gay man, 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 Eddie’s late-Soviet encounter with 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 Eddie seems implicitly to extend to Limonov. The claim of an elemental “Russianness” on behalf of the up-and-coming nationalist who was Eddie’s creator dictates Limonov’s dissociation from the novel’s bisexual protagonist, and in general to force homoerotic experience into subtext.