https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-DTFqLUZAc&t=1s
During an “encounter” with the émigré writer Eduard Limonov broadcasted from the concert hall in the Ostankino TV studios in Moscow (a common genre during perestroika), a young neformal in the audience suggests to create a subculture made up of young “limonovians.”
Post-Soviet
1992
In the early 1990s, after living in emigration for two decades, Eduard Limonov moved back to Russia and became a celebrity of sorts—on the one hand, through the popular success of his novel Eto ia Edichka (It’s Me, Eddie, 1979/1991), which focused on the author’s sexual experimenting, queerness, and marginality in New York in the 1970s—and, on the other, by provocatively celebrating masculinity, war, and even fascism as part of a kind of “revolt against the modern world.” While still in Paris, he started publishing his articles in several popular Russian periodicals (Sovershenno sekretno, Izvestiia, Sovetskaia Rossiia, Novyi vzgliad)—articles that came to be known as limonki (grenades) because of their author’s aggressive style—and soon thereafter, Limonka became the name of the cult newspaper released by the political organization-cum-punk movement he founded and led, the National Bolshevik Party (NBP). Limonov was frequently featured and interviewed in major newspapers, TV, and radio shows, and came to be recognized both for the raw sincerity of his writing and for his distinctive fashion: the black leather jacket, the red shirt, the thick tinted glasses, the short fade. Limonov’s success was based on a strange combination of cosmopolitanism and transgression (“did he really suck a black man’s dick” as he describes in detail in Eto ia—Edichka, readers and interviewers kept wondering until his death in 2020) with Soviet and working-class pride and, at the same time, irreverence towards traditions, commonly accepted norms, beliefs, and cultural capital—and toward the literary classics that the Russian intelligentsia kept in such high esteem. The artifact included here is an excerpt from one of Limonov’s first appearances on Russian television—part of the “Concert Hall Ostankino Encounter with” series (such meetings with writers, artists, directors, and public figures more generally went on throughout perestroika). During the one-hour event, following the show’s format, Limonov sits at a table on the stage, he talks about his work and biography, and, at the end, he answers a number of questions from the live audience. Introducing himself to his new Russian readers, he minimizes the “sexual subjects” in his work, referring to the first novel he published in the Soviet Union, U nas byla velikaia epokha (We had a great epoch), a quest for the author’s memories of his childhood during Stalin’s late years. He reinforces, instead, his new image as a tough working-class writer, son of a low-level NKVD officer from the industrial periphery of Kharkiv, describing his literary output as the result of hard labor and discipline, and his tastes as those of a man of the people: macaroni and sausages (makaroni s sosiskami, a staple of Soviet everyday life) and clothes that are comfortable enough for brawling with the police during street protests. During the show, Limonov displays an ability to attract sympathy from diverse groups across class and generations”: from the young alternative kids curious to hear more about Western punk bands to greyer middle-aged Soviet normies (to use an anachronistic term) who are seemingly more concerned about the changes that the end of the Soviet Union and Russia’s transition to democracy (and capitalism) is bringing. At the end of the show, a young neformal—an alternative kid dressed in all black and wearing thin round sunglasses—suggests to take inspiration from the lines of Limonov’s own poem “My—natsional’nyi geroi” (We are the national hero) and to start an organization of the writer’s fans who would imitate his style, preannouncing somewhat prophetically the foundation of the NBP, which starting in 1994 ended up being one of the first post-Soviet countercultural movements.
Russia
Limonov, Eduard
Soviet Union and Russia
“Eduard Limonov: Vstrecha v kontsertnoi studii Ostankino.” Pervyi kanal Ostankino. Moscow, Russian Federation, February 1992. [Pisatel’ Eduard Limonov. Vstrecha v kontsertnoi studii Ostankino. 1992. Mar 12, 2022. Youtube.com: Писатель Эдуард Лимонов. Встреча в Концертной студии Останкино 1992]