The Magical Chorus

It’s Me, Eddie, which created a brouhaha in emigre circles with its sexual episodes, unusually frank for Russian literature (including the homosexual encounter between the novel’s autobiographical hero and a black New Yorker in Central Park) and its free use of previously unprintable language.

In his New York years, he stood out in the rough-and-tumble Russian bohemian crowd with his neatness, punctuality, and reliability. Those qualities helped him get a job as butler in a millionaire’s house. But, behind the polished servant’s mask there lurked the adventurer and the neurotic mind of a Russian Louis Celine without the anti-Semitism. The artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan, a friend of Limonov’s, recalled the writer’s three suicide attempts (the first when he was still in school), all caused by failed love affairs.²⁴ Today, Limonov claims to have “iron mental health,” but back then, it was a different story.

Like the experienced tailor he was, Limonov recut his personal myth many times. People who knew him in his youth say he was a mama’s boy, while Limonov’s nostalgic autobiographical prose (Teenager Savenko, Young Scoundrel, and We Had a Great Epoch) depicts him as an adroit and fearless gang leader. Limonov’s father was an officer in the NKVD (KGB), but the young writer positioned himself among Moscow dissidents as staunchly anti-Soviet. When he immigrated, he tried to become a cosmopolitan author in the United States and later in France. Then, to the astonishment of his New York and Paris acquaintances, he declared himself a Russian patriot par excellence.

The biggest somersault came in the post-Soviet era, when Limonov moved back to Moscow, where in 1994 he founded the radical National-Bolshevik Party with the proclaimed goal of uniting extreme right and extreme left (in Limonov’s terminology, “fascists” and “anarchists”) to fight against democracy and the “new world order,” which he described as the “total despotism of the U.S.A. and the European Community over the world.”²⁵

In 2001, Limonov was arrested and in 2003 he was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of illegally procuring firearms, but he was released on probation a month later. Limonov learned of the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11 while in prison, and the news “made him exult,” because America “is a country of violence, dictating its will to everyone. It deserved to be punished.”²⁶

Over the two years in prison, Limonov wrote eight books, including his utopian manifesto, Another Russia: Outline of the Future, in which he proclaimed the collapse of the old Russian culture and presented his ideas of new, nomadic Russia. Now, Limonov said, “a writer’s glory no longer excites me. My literary talent has received world recognition. Now I want my political gift to be recognized.”²⁷

The low-circulation opposition newspapers where Prokhanov and Limonov published their passionate anti-Yeltsin appeals were shut down by presidential decree after the White House capitulated on October 4, 1993, under the pressure of pro-Yeltsin troops. The reactionaries spoke of violation of freedom of the press. However, many of these publications reopened, but they continued to be unpopular: none of the opposition ideologists had national authority.

There was probably only one man at that time who did: Solzhenitsyn. People were waiting to hear his opinion of the traumatic events that shook the nation. But Solzhenitsyn, who had lived twelve and a half years in the West by then and had announced that he was planning to return to Russia, spoke unusually briefly and impassively, characterizing the clash of October 3–4 as a “completely unavoidable and expected stage in our tortuous and long path for freedom from Communism.”²⁸

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn was being cautious so as to retain room for political maneuver. He had just completed the major work of his life, the ten-volume historical epic The Red Wheel, planned when he was an eighteen-year-old student. His idea was to describe the February 1917 revolution, which brought down the tsar and opened the way for the eventual Bolshevik victory, which he always considered the most significant and fateful event in Russia’s history, changing the destiny of the country and the world.

Solzhenitsyn explained the symbolism of the title this way: “Revolution is an enormous cosmic Wheel, like a galaxy…that begins unfolding—and all the people, including the ones that started it turning, become grains of sand. And they die there in multitudes.”²⁹ In order to describe the causes of revolution, Solzhenitsyn also tackled World War I and its roots, concentrating on four “knots”: August 1914, October 1916, March 1917, and April 1917.

This historic canvas of colossal scope (Solzhenitsyn worked on it for a solid eighteen years) presented complex narrative problems, which the author attempted to solve by compressing enormous documentary material through various devices: there are psychological profiles of political leaders of the period (the portraits of Lenin and Nicholas II are outstanding), chronicles of events, documents (letters, telegrams, leaflets), and ample quotations from newspapers.

It is all painstakingly organized, particularly with the help of rhythmically active prose. Solzhenitsyn manipulates the narrative rhythm, constantly changing it, juxtaposing contrasting sections and small episodes. This is musical prose, comparable not to War and Peace, as it sometimes is, but to the operas of Mussorgsky or Rimsky-Korsakov.

When I wrote to Solzhenitsyn in 1985 about this (in connection with October 1916), he replied: “You felt it very correctly: frankly, my favorite ‘literature’ teacher is Beethoven, I somehow always hear him when I write.”³⁰The Red Wheel, contrary to the popular perception of Solzhenitsyn as a heavily didactic writer, has no central hero to express the author’s point of view—it is dialogical (to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology), or even symphonic.

Solzhenitsyn clearly wanted to give the reader a maximum amount of “objective” information to consider: hence the stress on describing real events instead of love triangles, so beloved in the novel genre. Trying to comprehend what led Russia to revolution, which he considered a national tragedy, Solzhenitsyn came to the conclusion that “everyone was at fault, including the ordinary people, who easily fell for the cheap infection, the cheap trick, and rushed to loot, to kill, rushed to join the bloody dance. But the guiltiest of all, of course, were those in charge.”³¹

This point of view precluded the acceptance of The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn’s life work, both among liberals, who still considered the February revolution an important milestone in the failed history of democracy in Russia, and among conservatives, who thought that all the country’s woes were caused by outsiders, Jews being the main culprits.

Solzhenitsyn’s relations with the Western political elite were not very good. He was always a fierce opponent of detente with the Soviet Union. Feeling that Western compromises would inevitably lead to catastrophe, Solzhenitsyn came up with an astonishing thesis that “World War III has already taken place and it ended with the defeat of the West.”³²

With this polemical slogan, the writer thrust himself into the very center of American political debate. His moral capital in the West was substantial at the time, and Solzhenitsyn decided to use it to make a difference in US foreign policy. His 1973 “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” an ambitious program of reforms for Communist Russia, was never answered. Apparently, he expected US politicians to heed his advice more readily. He was mistaken.

The West did exploit Solzhenitsyn to the hilt in the Cold War. But the writer wanted to be more than an ideological weapon in someone else’s hands. He aspired to a position of real political power, without getting American citizenship first. (Congress had discussed making him an honorary citizen but then quietly dropped the