From Russia, With Angst

IN RUSSIA, if you tell someone your troubles and then disregard his advice, your advisor will probably shrug and say. "It's your life." In this country, says Russian emigre Edward Limonov, we have no patience for anyone but ourselves. Without even listening, we use the formula "that's your problem," which the author calls "the most murderous expression since the origin of mankind."

It's a wonder that Limonov, who left Russia for the West in 1974, would notice such a distinction between cultures--for him, life is one big problem. It's Me, Eddie, Limonov's "fictional memoir" of a debauched, desperate Russian poet on welfare in New York City, was designed to shock the emigre community when it first appeared in 1974. Just translated into English, the book aims its bitter criticism at all the things that made Limonov's life miserable--that is, anything that can be cursed or sexually degraded. Naturally, his adopted homeland comes in for more than its fair share of rabbit punches. "And yet I scorn you (Americans)," he writes. "Because you lead dull lives, sell yourselves into the slavery of work, because of your vulgar plaid pants, because you make money and have never seen the world. You're shit!"

Such judgments lose much of their potency when delivered by a narrator whose life centers around probing the limits of alcoholism and sexual perversion. Obscenities, apparently varied and clever in the original Russian, flow steadily and unendingly through Limonov's rocky prose. These have been translated with a singular lack of inspiration into either "fuck" or "shit," and serve rather to dull one's sensibilities than to shock them. Likewise, Eddie's staggering feats of drinking become banal with repetition. Thankfully, vodka does not interfere with the lucidity of either his narration or his pain. Although he describes his own unhappiness and self-degradation with the same unsentimental gusto he might use on approaching a pot of hearty Russian cabbage soup, he never lets his explication of these problems degenerate into the murky themes of an alcoholic burp.

Then there is sex. Early in the novel, Eddie apologizes for his tendency to fantasize about store mannequins: "I'm not fucking much." Yet he engages in varying forms of sexual activity with a startling array of partners--with rich women, poor women, ugly men, handsome men, old and young, with bums he meets in parking lots at night, with everyone, in fact, but his ex-wife Elena, the only one of these who excites, pains, and motivates him. When Elena, a failed and bitchy fashion model who cares for nothing but lovers and negligee, finally shows up in the novel's last few pages, the premise on which the book is based turns into a terrific anticlimax.

LIMONOV, however, is writing not about losing a wife but about losing a country. Elena's defection spurs Eddie's fantasies and seductions, the meat of the novel. Yet it is his move to America that gives her the freedom to leave him in the first place. Thus she becomes a symbol for the losses the exile must suffer in his adopted home. As the imaginary object for all Eddie's nostalgic yearnings for the old country. Elena is naturally less wonderful in reality than in memory.

Exiled and isolated in a strange and uncommunicative world. Eddie the poet loses his language and so his trade. In the Soviet Union he could at least publish a few underground volumes, but in America he loses his voice altogether. Eddie's resentment toward the Soviet dissidents who urge others to emigrate without ever having been in the West themselves is, then, understandable. Limonov repeatedly attacks that paragon of dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for instigating Eddie's immigration. For Eddie, Solzhenitsyn is a propaganda artist. In one scene, "the prophet" talks on television; while frustrated Eddie and Elena make their big statement by having intercourse in front of the set.

Russian emigres have generally denied Limonov's portrayal of their life and feelings for America; no self-respecting Russian, they claim, could lead a life of such decadence, and they point to the material advantages of emigration. But for Eddie the two political systems, capitalist and communist, are the same. "Both states bullshit about the justice of their systems, but where's my money?" And while the dissidents claim there is freedom in the West, Eddie knows otherwise: "They've got no fucking freedom here, just try and say anything bold at work. No fuss, on muss, but you're out on your ear." Eddie is a captive of society; the bars on his windows are Work and Money, and his social vision never transcends selfishness.

Eddie's most original utterances are lines like: "And love will come to the world if the causes of unlove are annihilated," His carping is the frustrated whining of the adolescent misreading Camps for the first time. As usual, Eddie knows his own problems--"All children are extremists. I have remained an extremist, have not become a grown up."

For Eddie the child, the streets of New York are a playground. There he cavorts with the lowest of the low, enjoying great sexual satisfaction with bums and bagwomen, while at once mourning the loss of his ideal love, his "Angel Fucker," Elena, whom the rich have spirited away. Thus Limonov hopes to demonstrate the vacuity of American culture; all emigres, not only Eddie, have betrayed their own natures by giving up a homeland where there is at least a little love (though we are never told why this is so) for a place which offers no love, and money for only some.

In the character of Eddie, Limonov attempts to demonstrate this socio-political viewpoint carried to the nth degree. With his version of what he calls Russian Maximalism he gives us minimal insight; his social analysis is old and boring, and he leaves the reader with only a shell of bizarre acts and feelings without cohesion.

Only toward the novel's close are the layers of hate and obscenity stripped away--only when this is accomplished does Eddie begin talking with us. A stubborn, tenacious adolescent, he sees himself as a "man who has lost all but has not surrendered a fucking thing... And here, when we want, finally, to put our arms around him and hear more, he shrugs us off and retires behind a cloak of scorn, finishing. "Fuck you, cock sucking bastards! You can all go straight to hell!" But that's his problem.