Andrei Sakharov Wins the Nobel Peace Prize becomes a turning point not because the book follows the award ceremony, but because the award gives Eduard Limonov a subject on which to make his first consequential polemical intervention. Sakharov’s international stature, and the dissident movement gathered around him, offer Limonov an opening to challenge the moral authority of the émigré and dissident worlds in which he himself is struggling to find a place.

Sakharov and the Dissident Cause

Sakharov is introduced as a physicist and the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb who had rallied dissidents for several years and publicly campaigned for the Helsinki Accords and human rights in the Soviet Union. Accounts of him, as the narrator describes them, present a figure of exceptional intellectual rigor and moral rectitude, almost a saint. The Nobel Peace Prize intensifies that already powerful public image, making Sakharov a prominent symbol of the dissidents’ cause.

The award also provides Limonov with a subject precisely because that image irritates him. The book does not present his response as a considered dispute over Sakharov’s personal integrity: Limonov has no reason to disbelieve what has been reported about him. His target instead is the dissidents’ claim to speak for the country. He argues that they are isolated from ordinary people and represent themselves—and, in Sakharov’s case, the interests of the scientific nomenklatura—rather than the population as a whole.

Limonov’s Polemic

The award creates an opportunity for Limonov to try polemical writing after other routes have failed to attract notice. The narrator contrasts inventing stories, recounting true ones, and offering opinions on the world as it is: Limonov’s proposed columns about Kharkov thugs and the Moscow underground, like his poems, interest no one, while he is depicted as lacking the imagination needed to build a career in fiction. He shuts himself away for two days and writes a furious, witty argument against the dissidents’ authority and the idealized picture of the West.

His argument extends beyond the claim that the dissidents represent a narrow caste. He warns that if they, or politicians committed to their ideas, came to power, the result could be worse than the existing bureaucracy. He describes life in the Soviet Union as gray and boring, but rejects its portrayal as a concentration camp. He also contends that the West is no better and that émigrés encouraged to turn against their country may discover, after leaving, that nobody in America needs them. The attack thus joins a political claim about representation to a personal anxiety: after six months at Novoye russkoye slovo and on the margins of the jet set, Limonov is beginning to fear that he, too, has arrived somewhere that has no use for him. He calls the article “Disillusion.”

Reception and Consequences

The response makes the difference between an argument’s intended audience and its actual reach stark. The New York Times and several other prestigious newspapers do not acknowledge receiving the article. It appears more than two months later in an obscure magazine and goes unnoticed by the New York City intelligentsia it was meant to challenge. Yet it disturbs the small émigré community and the comfortable torpor at Novoye russkoye slovo. Even people who concede that parts of the analysis may be true hesitate to publicize it, fearing that doing so would serve the Communists.

The dispute becomes personal when editor in chief Moishe Borodatikh summons Limonov to his office and points, indignantly, to a Soviet newspaper spread across his desk. Komsomolskaya Pravda has printed a photomontage: the photograph is old and was taken in Moscow, but the montage places Limonov at the foot of a New York skyscraper. Its caption presents the poet as revealing the truth about dissidents and emigration. Borodatikh tells him that people say he works for the KGB. Limonov answers with a shrug and leaves without waiting to be dismissed. The Nobel occasion has therefore produced an unexpected result: a polemic ignored by its intended American readership becomes a source of agitation, suspicion, and rupture inside the émigré newspaper world.