Budapest is the setting for an international writers’ conference that exposes the friction between Eduard Limonov’s self-fashioned outsider identity and the respectable literary world receiving him. The city is shown through a sequence of public encounters rather than as a developed urban landscape: a panel discussion, a hotel bar, and a minibus stopped beside a military truck. Across those spaces, Limonov alternates between challenging his fellow writers and taking pleasure in the political power his homeland still seems to command.

The conference and its literary company

Limonov attends the gathering as a writer now invited to international events. The delegates include the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz and the South African writer Nadine Gordimer; the French contingent includes the young Jean Echenoz and Alain Robbe-Grillet, who is accompanied by his wife. The narrative sketches the Robbe-Grillets as sociable and entertaining, then contrasts these individual personalities with the broader conference atmosphere: tweed jackets, half-moon glasses, blue-rinse perms, and publishing-world gossip. The assembly strikes Limonov as little different from a Union of Soviet Writers delegation on an excursion to Sochi.

That comparison makes Budapest more than a neutral conference setting. The gathering presents itself as an international community of prestigious intellectuals, yet Limonov reads its conventions through the familiar institutional habits of the Soviet literary establishment. The city brings together writers from different countries, but his response is to expose what he sees as their shared formality rather than to join it.

The panel and the hotel bar

During a dreary panel with Hungarian writers, an organizer welcomes the delegates as prestigious intellectuals. Limonov rejects the designation, describing himself instead as a wary worker who is neither progressive nor part of a union, and insisting that workers are history’s perennial dupes. The Robbe-Grillets laugh, Jean Echenoz smiles distractedly, and the Hungarian writers are appalled. Limonov intensifies the provocation by saying that he despises laborers and poor people because he has been one of them, remains poor, and gives them nothing. Afterward, no one asks him further questions.

The hotel bar turns verbal antagonism into violence. When a British writer disparages the Soviet Union, Limonov hits him. Others try to intervene, but Limonov continues punching, and the confrontation becomes a brawl. In Echenoz’s account, the respected Nadine Gordimer is struck by a bar stool in the ensuing disorder. The episode gives the conference’s polite literary setting a sudden physical consequence: a dispute over the Soviet Union does not remain an abstract exchange of opinions.

The minibus and the military truck

On the return journey to the hotel after a panel, a military truck draws up beside the delegates’ minibus at a red light. Fear and excitement spread among the passengers as they recognize the Red Army; the group presses toward the windows, reacting as if watching a theatrical spectacle. Limonov closes his eyes with a satisfied smile. The sight reassures him that his country can still frighten Western intellectuals, and that, in this respect, all is well.

The truck supplies a sharp counterpoint to the conference’s literary rituals and the bar fight. In Budapest, Soviet power is not encountered through a political argument but through its sudden visible presence beside a vehicle full of writers. The delegates’ mixture of alarm and delight becomes a spectacle for Limonov in turn: he takes their response as evidence that the formidable homeland he imagines remains intact.