Alcoholism

Alcoholism becomes one of the recurring crises in Natasha’s life with Eduard Limonov: a condition that he recognizes, tries to manage, and cannot resolve. The account contrasts her escalating dependence with his own intermittent binges, then follows the cycle of care, temporary recovery, and relapse into the uncertainty of their marriage.

Recognition and contrast

Natasha works as a singer at the Russian cabaret Raspoutine and often comes home late and drunk. At first, Eduard Limonov takes her drinking for a fondness for alcohol. The decisive change in his understanding comes when he discovers that she has begun drinking as soon as she gets up in the morning; he recognizes this as alcoholism rather than merely heavy social drinking.

The account sets her condition beside Limonov’s own drinking, but distinguishes the patterns. He can drink a staggering amount over an evening and then spend three weeks drinking only water; even a wild binge does not prevent him from sitting at his desk at seven the next morning. The comparison makes his recognition of Natasha’s dependence more pointed: he knows excess from experience, yet sees that her drinking has become something different.

Care, respite, and relapse

Limonov tries to protect Natasha by watching over her, hiding bottles, and repeatedly urging her not to waste her talent. With his support, she stays sober long enough to write a book about her adolescence in the Leningrad suburbs, Ma, I Love a Swindler, which Olivier publishes. The respite lasts only a couple of months. She then returns to drinking and begins disappearing for two or three days at a time.

One disappearance sends Limonov searching throughout Paris. He calls their friends, hospitals, and the police before Natasha finally returns, haggard, dirty, and staggering on her high heels. She collapses onto the bed; he lifts her limp body and undresses her. When she comes round forty-eight hours later, he cares for her like a sick child, bringing broth and asking what happened. She remembers nothing. The narrative names this state zapoi, placing the episode within a cycle in which a disappearance is followed by physical collapse, lost time, and Limonov’s renewed caretaking.

The condition within the marriage

Friends also tell Limonov that Natasha has been sleeping with men she does not know, a pattern they consider dangerous. Natasha confesses tearfully that this behavior began when she was fourteen: afterward she feels ashamed and promises herself she will not repeat it, but does so again. The account presents this alongside her alcoholism as another compulsive pattern, not as an effect of drinking. Limonov’s earlier, abstractly amused idea of nymphomania gives way to alarm when faced with the distress of the woman he loves.

Their arguments are violent, but are followed by passionate reconciliations. Natasha cries; Limonov comforts her, holds and rocks her, and promises that she can rely on him and that he will rescue her. Then the cycle resumes: she rejects the security he offers, and they separate and reunite several times. His devotion is real, but it does not cure the condition or stabilize the relationship.

The uncertainty persists when Natasha leaves Paris a week before Limonov does and then cannot be found in Moscow. After a major quarrel, she calls him drunk on the night she arrives, saying that things are awful, and he hears nothing further. He has no address for her, only her mother’s unanswered number, and worries that her visa may have expired. Asked whether he loves her, he answers that she is his wife. The episode leaves the reader with the bond still asserted but Natasha’s whereabouts and drinking unresolved.