The Central House of Writers is the setting for Eduard Limonov’s bitter return to Moscow’s literary establishment. Invited to a venue he had struggled to enter twenty years earlier, he expects to savor revenge; instead, the afternoon exposes the distance between his self-fashioned identity as a living, adventurous artist and the former underground writers who now judge him.

Setting and Return

Limonov arrives at the Central House of Writers expecting to encounter cultural officials. His invitation has seemed to promise a reversal of an old exclusion: once he could barely get inside, whereas now he is being asked to appear. But the building offers no triumph. It smells of a cafeteria, and its poets look to him like petty bureaucrats. The least unpleasant person there is the woman behind the bar, who serves him cognac in a coffee cup. She does not recognize him, though he recognizes her from the days when Arseny Tarkovsky gave readings there.

The old room thus joins different layers of Limonov’s literary life without reconciling them. A familiar face confirms the continuity of the institution, while the invitation itself marks a change in his standing. The anticipated pleasure of revenge quickly gives way to an encounter in which the past is remembered differently by everyone present.

The Audience and Its Judgments

Limonov is led into a small room where a sparse audience is waiting. Rather than the cultural apparatchiks he expected, he finds veterans of the underground: people whose faces he remembers from parties and poetry readings, though none is a close friend. Their changed appearance strikes him first. They are pallid or red-faced, potbellied, and beaten-looking; to his mind, the secrecy and censorship that once surrounded their work had concealed what he now sees as their mediocrity.

One of the audience members has obtained one of the 300,000 copies of Ours Was a Great Epoch. He challenges Limonov over what he considers an apology for the KGB from a supposed dissident. Limonov rejects the label: he had been a delinquent, not a dissident. The exchange makes the room a tribunal over both his book and the category through which others want to interpret his life.

A middle-aged woman says that she remembers him as a young, inspired, long-haired poet and is shocked to see him now looking like a Komsomol secretary. The disagreement is about more than his appearance. Limonov’s idea of the artist allows for a crew cut, horn-rimmed glasses, and tight black clothes; the woman’s expectation associates the poet with the derelict look of Venichka Erofeev. At the Central House of Writers, clothing becomes a visible test of who can claim the underground’s cultural identity.

Disputed Affiliations and a Shortened Visit

Erofeev’s name brings another accusation into the room. An audience member reports that the author of Moscow to the End of the Line had heard Limonov was returning, but, on learning that the scandalous media tycoon Yulian Semyonov was sponsoring him, had said he would refuse to shake Limonov’s hand. Limonov answers that he was never Erofeev’s friend and had not intended to visit him. The reported refusal therefore cannot serve as a straightforward account of a broken friendship; Limonov disputes the relationship on which the accusation depends.

The discussion continues for half an hour, with the participants talking past one another. When it ends, Limonov declines an invitation to drink with the young members of the Writers’ Union. At four in the afternoon it is already dark. He leaves with the collar of his thin Potemkin jacket pulled up, a small physical image of departure replacing the public vindication he had hoped to obtain.

A Changed Literary Field

The encounter removes Limonov’s desire to see his old friends and confirms, in his view, that he was right to slip away from them fifteen years earlier. He imagines them having remained in an uncomfortable security, protected by silence while he struggled on the Western front. In the underground’s earlier self-image, failure, anonymity, and even decrepitude could be treated as honorable signs of a culture preserved in secret for a freer future. Once freedom arrives, however, that promised recognition does not follow. The former underground writers must face competition, while young gangsters working for Semyonov have the advantage.

The Central House of Writers consequently appears both as an institutional refuge and as a place where the underground’s old claims have lost force. Its members continue to venerate Erofeev while distrusting Limonov, whose adventurous public life does not fit their preferred image of the dissident poet. The failed homecoming turns the venue into a measure of changed literary authority: the past can be displayed and debated there, but the people who once imagined themselves its guardians do not command the future they expected.