Eduard Limonov, the writer who wanted a revolution, dies

Eduard Limonov, a man made of the written word. For his, the one coined in his work, but especially for that of the French novelist Emmanuel Carrère, who published his biography and placed it on the pedestal of fame. If we talk about him today it is because of that book, that he discovered it to the world, more than his own. Paradoxical. A writer who reaches literary glory when another makes him a literary character. Is there something existentially more dramatic and powerful? He was born with the vocation of Russian poets and the idealistic delusion of a Ural messiah. As if rage, obfuscation and talent were confused in him in a kind of human fever, driving an electricizing talent and an unavoidable vocation for doom and self-eviction. He had the hunger of a Siberian wolf and the creative drive of a suicide bomber. Its origins are as claustrophobic as they are exciting, full of inspiration and youthful confidence, as if it was predestined by some Olympus to eat the Earth. He had the claw of the verb and the untamed conscience of the leaders made of greatness and seismic miseries.

He published books that gave him the wick of an early reputation, "The Teen Savenko," and he fled to New York with a poet who had a lot of role model, one of those women who make a man abandon his pride and lose self-esteem. The account of that breakup, of how his beautiful Russian wife abandons him in the United States, is full of delirious filth, as if the whole scene had been the spill of a Bukovski play. This episode came out through the most unexpected street, for a few days of famine, poverty and homosexuality that dragged him along the avenues of the Big Apple.

Literary success

But Limonov came from the genetics of survival. He was already an old battleship, one of those who always return to a dry port to be repaired. Of that way, From her sexual experiences with a black man, a literary torrent came to her that curdled into "It's me, Eduard." The book did not come out in the US USA, but yes in France, which is a homeland made to recognize what is rejected in other nations. He achieved recognition and launched into a frantic career of titles, "History of his server" and "Diary of a failure", which served as a visiting card to enter the Gallic literary circles and, as a consequence, revolutionized the literature of his country. It was not bad for an emigrant, for a prophet who has had to leave his land. His reputation then began to grapple with his political postulates. That fencing between the style of the word and the ideological emotions that has ended eroding more than one writer. They called it everything: communist, fascist. What can you expect from a guy who admires Mishima and Stalin?

In the 1990s he took an active part in the Yugoslavia War. He sided with the Serbs and joined a sniper party. An eternal question has remained unanswered above his head ever since, like a Damocles sword: Did he kill someone? There is Carrére for those looking for answers. His subsequent drift brings him back to Russia, he stood against Putin and in favor of his opponents, such as Gary Kaspárov, he founded the outlawed National Bolshevik Party and was president of The Other Russia. In his later years he wore the glasses of Nabokov, the hair and gesture of a contemporary Trotsky, and the disheveled knob of a Chekhov. He always defined himself with opposites, like an atheist Zoroastrian, as if the basis of his ideology was made of reconciliation of opposites or the moral position before the public res also depended on clairvoyance or literary aesthetics. Nationalist, moderate, socialist and defense attorney for constitutional rights. Yesterday, this man, who lived or survived, is not clear, between the glow of the outburst and the rest of the narrative, He died at the age of 77 in a Russian hospital. He remained until the last moment speaking, with health, as if even death had to be one more lightning bolt in his life and not the agony of another mortal. His horoscope was closer to a rock and roll star than to a political leader. He always aspired to a revolution. He never imagined that, in the end, his agitation, the uprising that he brought with him, was the example of a wild life and all those books that he wrote and now leaves orphans.