Common decency and moral integrity

Common decency and moral integrity offer a countermeasure to the grandiose identities and political postures surrounding Eduard Limonov. In the book, the idea is given its clearest definition by Olga Matitch, whose judgment of Limonov is both unusually admiring and deliberately tested against the violence and alliances that make such admiration difficult.

The Meaning of Decency

Matitch, a White Russian scholar who knew Limonov during his years in the United States, remained on good terms with him when many readers of It’s Me, Eddie had quickly decided to hate its author. She taught classes on his work and visited him in Moscow; for three decades, she liked and admired him. Her assessment is emphatic: “And the only really good man among them is Limonov. Really, he’s one of the most decent men I’ve met in my life.” The book treats this not as a verdict that settles the question, but as a judgment worth investigating because of the character of the person making it.

The term carries the sense George Orwell gave to “common decency”: honesty joined to common sense, distrust of grand words, fidelity to one’s word, a realistic regard for reality, and attention to others. It is presented as more common among ordinary people than among the upper classes, and especially rare among intellectuals. That definition makes decency practical rather than spectacular: it appears in how a person meets other people and keeps contact with the facts of their lives. Yet the narrator cannot simply place this moral quality over Limonov like a halo. His shooting in the direction of Sarajevo and his plotting with Colonel Alksnis sit uneasily beside Matitch’s praise—and, the book notes, Matitch herself recognizes the tension.

Attention to the Inmates

The book finds the strongest evidence for Matitch’s judgment in Limonov’s writing about prison. Across three books about his imprisonment, the narcissist and egotist turns away from posing as the central figure and becomes sincerely interested in how his cellmates arrived where they were. Many were ordinary criminals serving long sentences for serious offenses, including murder with aggravating circumstances. Their regard for him pleased him: they treated his party as a gang rather than a pack of idealists, called him “Limon the boss,” and a godfather discreetly offered him entry into the brotherhood of the vory v zakone. Those gestures appeal to his lifelong fascination with gangsters, but the book distinguishes this familiar appetite for status from the more surprising attention he gives the men around him.

When inmates asked him to write their stories, he did so, producing dozens of micronovels. His attention extends across sharply different fates: the Engels gang’s systematic plundering of an industrial city and its members’ sentences, ranging from twenty-two years to life; an inmate’s heartbreak when, the day before his release, a letter revealed that his bride-to-be had moved in with someone else; and the misery and shame surrounding two young cousins convicted of raping and killing an eleven-year-old girl. Limonov tries to comfort the abandoned inmate, thinking of Nastia, and spends time with the cousins, one of whom is mentally retarded. He writes about how their loneliness and inability to handle a vulnerable child culminated in terrible harm, without turning that understanding into an excuse.

The moment of departure makes this attention reciprocal. One cousin, facing a lifetime of bullying in a harsh prison camp, wishes him well with the words “Good luck, Edik.” Limonov is troubled and overwhelmed, and the narrator emphasizes that he has nothing but respect for such a sendoff. The scene does not erase the crime; it shows that Limonov can register the person speaking even when that person has committed an appalling act. In prison, decency appears less as a claim to innocence than as a refusal to reduce another human being to a judgment alone.

Knowing Where He Is

Prison gives Limonov a relation to other people that the book finds strikingly unlike his customary grandstanding. He describes himself not as a judge standing above the men around him but as their brother, a small man buffeted by prison’s bad winds, writing for the people who asked him to tell their stories. The narrator says he has no illusions about them and does not sentimentalize them, yet he is attentive, curious, and sometimes helpful. The balance matters: refusing to judge does not mean pretending that crime is harmless; it means staying close to the actual people and circumstances rather than replacing them with abstractions.

That groundedness surprises the narrator, who had thought of Limonov as someone usually far out in left field. To explain the change, he recalls his friend, the judge Étienne Rigal, whose highest compliment is that someone knows where he is. In prison, the narrator says, Limonov does. His own formulation turns that steadiness into a reciprocal movement: “I’m one of those who is never lost, wherever he is. I approach other people, other people approach me. Things fall naturally into place.” The claim does not resolve the contradiction between decency and Limonov’s political and violent associations; it identifies a narrower, concrete virtue. In the prison scenes, he can meet others where they are, and allow their stories to matter beyond the role they play in his own.

The Biographer’s Test

The account of decency emerges from the biographer’s own uncertainty, not from a settled defense of Limonov. While writing, he sometimes hated his subject and sometimes feared that he had misunderstood the life he was trying to tell. In San Francisco, he sought a conversation with film producer Tom Luddy, whose suggestion led to dinner with Olga Matitch the following day. Her testimony therefore enters the narrative as a considered witness’s judgment, one that the biographer takes seriously without treating it as proof that Limonov’s actions can be excused. The distinction matters: moral integrity is not offered as a halo that cancels political violence, but as a quality the book tests against particular conduct. The prison episodes become decisive because they let the claim be examined in practice—in the attention Limonov gives to people whose stories do not flatter him—while leaving the larger contradiction unresolved.