Limonov, Eduard. Eto ia, Edhichka: roman. Moscow: Glagol, 1991
Glagol Press (Moscow) 1991 edition of Eduard Limonov’s It’s Me, Eddy.
Post-Soviet
1991
This 1991 edition from the Moscow publisher Glagol is the first Russian (published in Russia) edition of Eduard Limonov’s 1979 novel It’s Me, Eddy (Это я, Эдичка). Originally published in New York by Index Publishers, the book features an eponymous central figure who shares Limonov’s first name, as well as his experience of struggling for physical and psychological survival as a Russian émigré in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Parts of the novel are intensely homoerotic and portray the central figure’s numerous sexual encounters with other men. It was published in a number of foreign translations (French, Italian, Dutch) which took the novel’s homoerotic elements to be its most salient and rendered the title as “The Russian Poet Likes Big Black Guys” (“Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres,” “Il poeta russo preferisce i grandi negri,” “De Russische dichter houdt van grote negers”). Glagol — the Moscow-based press that published the novel in 1991 — published Russian translations of Western works by LGBTQ authors (James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs, Edmund White) as well as books by Russian LGBTQ authors and/or books on LGBTQ themes. Glagol produced the first-ever editions of works by the late Soviet gay author Evgeny Kharitonov, and also published scholarship on LGBTQ aspects of Russian social and cultural history. Limonov returned to Russia in 1991 and became involved in nationalist politics. From that moment he would deny that the homoerotic adventures of what many assumed was his literary alter ego were in no way autobiographical, and suggest that they were merely a literary device for representing the protagonist’s degradation (perhaps suggested by the institution of опущенные — “fallen” male inmates who were used for the sexual gratification of other men higher-up in the Soviet inmate hierarchy). The 1991 Glagol edition’s fifteen-page foreword was written by one of the press’s founders, Aleksander Nikolaevich Shatalov. In it he seems to studiously avoid direct references to the novel’s homoerotic dimensions and waver on the extent to which the book’s central figure can be read as a representation of Limonov himself, at moments treating the two as more or less coterminous, at others cautioning against conflating “Edichka” and his author. In her book Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999), sociologist Laurie Essig observed that Glagol tended to publish books in which characters did not have Western-styled LGBTQ identities, but indulged in same-sex erotic behavior as part of some alternate shadow reality or hidden second life. Essig saw this as indicative of a broader post-Soviet tendency to insulate homosexual activity from one’s public or social identity, and to resist the contemporary Western convention of LGBTQ sexual identities. Shatalov here presents the late-Soviet encounter with American culture represented in Eddy’s émigré experience in New York as one that fortifies the protagonist’s Russianness and steels his resolve not to be absorbed into Western (American) culture.
While explicit references to homoerotism are absent from his preface to the 1991 Glagov edition of It’s Me, Eddie, Shatalov is reported to have said privately (to Laurie Essig) that Limonov was definitively gay. In his 2019 book Those Newly Passed (Свежеотбывшие на тот свет) Limonov stated that Shatalov’s death a year earlier was the result of complications from HIV infection.
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
Gay men (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061798)--Russia (Federation)
Limonov, Eduard (https://lccn.loc.gov/n79137611)
Eduard Limonov (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q295537)
Limonov, Eduard (http://viaf.org/viaf/46771143)
Bisexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/no2009062104)
Homosexuality and literature (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061789)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)
Shatalov, A. (Aleksandr) (https://lccn.loc.gov/nr92007882)
Aleksandr Shatalov (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4520828)
Shatalov, A. (Aleksandr) (http://viaf.org/viaf/430132)
Shatalov, Alexander and Limonov, Eduard
Russia
Eduard. Eto ia, Edhichka: roman. Moscow: Glagol, 1991