Eduard Limonov's employment as Steven Gray's housekeeper

Eduard Limonov’s employment as Steven Gray’s butler brings him unusually close to inherited American wealth while making the distance between them impossible to ignore. Gray welcomes him as an authentic Russian poet, trusts him with the rhythms and secrets of his household, and regards him as a valued companion; Limonov, meanwhile, becomes an exemplary servant whose private thoughts include violent fantasies against the class he serves. Their relationship is neither simple friendship nor open hostility: its calm surface depends on a division of power that Limonov performs impeccably and inwardly rejects.

Introduction and Setting

Jenny introduces Limonov, then her boyfriend, to her employer, Steven Gray. Forty years old, good-looking, sociable, and a multimillionaire, Gray has inherited his fortune. He lives with his wife and three children in a sumptuous Connecticut manor and sometimes stays at his New York City apartment on Sutton Place. Jenny lives there full time; a secretary manages the mail, and a Haitian cleaning lady helps with the work. The household staff, much larger at Gray’s Connecticut home, waits for his visits with a mixture of apprehension and dread.

Gray is not portrayed as a tyrant. He can be impatient and quick to anger over small things, though he later apologizes, and he takes pains to appear liberal toward his employees. He calls Jenny and Limonov by their first names, and expects them to call him Steven. He fetches his own breakfast rather than summoning Jenny with a bell, and asks politely before taking the copy of The New York Times that Limonov is reading. Yet the gestures of equality coexist with an unspoken expectation that breakfast will be ready, the tea properly brewed, and the toast fresh. The arrangement’s informality does not erase the hierarchy; it makes the hierarchy more comfortable to inhabit.

The Employer and His Russian Guest

Gray likes Limonov almost immediately. He is interested in artists, takes pride in having lost a million dollars producing an avant-garde film, and is fascinated by Russia. His grandmother was a White Russian emigrant who spoke Russian to him when he was a child; he retains only a few words, spoken with an accent associated with the former regime. He often hosts Russians passing through New York, and Limonov’s presence offers something more compelling: a Russian poet who can describe life in the Soviet Union from experience.

Their conversations give Gray stories about Limonov’s time in a psychiatric hospital and his entanglements with the Committee for State Security. Limonov embellishes the account, drawing out versions of political internment he knows will appeal to his listener and delivering them with the expected deference. His performance suits Gray’s appetite for an intimate encounter with Russian experience. At the same time, it lets Limonov turn his own past into a story for a wealthy audience, tailoring what he tells to the tastes of the room.

Limonov is not wholly blind to Gray’s humanity. He recognizes that Gray is neither stupid nor personally unbearable, and that he does not resemble the crude Soviet caricature of a capitalist: a cruel, bloated exploiter of the poor. Yet this fair-minded observation cannot settle the question that troubles him. Gray has inherited immense wealth, while Limonov watches that wealth at close quarters from the position of a guest who serves. His private test of Gray is whether he could survive without the fortune, dropped into the jungle with only his wits and his body. The question opens onto Limonov’s larger grievance about unequal starting points, not merely a dislike of one employer.

The Butler’s Competence and the Hidden Division

Limonov becomes a frequent guest before turning into Gray’s butler. After Gray loses his previous housekeeper, Limonov has already spent months helping around the house: repairing a table leg, oiling garden tools, and cooking borscht that the guests enjoy. He knows the household, and Gray is attracted to the idea of employing a Russian poet in domestic service. Limonov’s practical familiarity and Gray’s taste for the unusual converge in the new arrangement.

As a butler, Limonov proves exceptionally capable. He manages the Haitian cleaning lady’s work with exacting standards and gets along with the secretary, even when she is difficult. He is wary of people at the door but adjusts quickly from suspicion to deference when a visitor is recognized. He handles deliveries, obtains the best cuts from Ottomanelli’s, an expensive New York butcher, and cooks both Russian dishes and vegetables unfamiliar to him from his earlier diet. He remembers Gray’s habits, serves whiskey at the right temperature, and can be trusted to collect ten thousand dollars in cash from the bank. He also knows when to avert his eyes and when a guest might welcome his Che Guevara T-shirt and his participation in conversation. Gray’s friends envy him; Limonov becomes the talk of Manhattan.

The polished service sharpens rather than softens the inequality. Limonov can read Gray’s preferences, anticipate his needs, and move among his guests, but his access remains conditional on his role. When Gray dresses in an expensive suit to lunch at a restaurant whose cheapest meal would feed a Puerto Rican family for a month, Limonov places that comfort beside his own imagined alternative: a life in which Gray had to make his way without inherited wealth. He can admire his employer’s civility and still resent the structure that makes one man master and the other his attendant.

Private Rebellion and the Story’s Afterlife

Limonov’s outward deference conceals a more radical judgment. The account presents revolution, not gradual reform or political conversation, as his answer to the inequality he sees. His fantasies are not directed solely at Gray as an individual; Gray stands near the top of a social order that Limonov imagines destroying. The resulting relationship is unsettling precisely because its daily civility is real. Gray is not shown as a monster, and Limonov is not simply pretending to like him. Yet affection and competence do not reconcile Limonov to serving a world he considers unjust.

After a French publisher accepts Limonov’s book, he leaves for Paris with Gray’s sincere good wishes. The employment is described as lasting a year; in the later retrospective account, the two men are also characterized as having trusted and lived alongside one another for almost two years. Gray’s confidence in the household’s calm becomes newly vulnerable when he reads His Butler’s Story, published by Grove Press in 1987. The book reveals that Limonov used Gray’s bedroom in his absence, tried on his clothes, drank his wine, and brought women into the house. These violations expose a private assumption of mastery beneath the careful service, though the narrator suggests that Gray might have been less troubled by the transgressions themselves than by what they disclose about Limonov’s thoughts.

The book also reframes small moments Gray may have forgotten. Once, after Gray erupted over trousers delayed at the cleaners, Limonov listened with a pale, impassive face. Gray apologized an hour later, and the two laughed; Limonov later claimed that if the outburst had continued for a few seconds more, he would have taken a kitchen knife and killed him. At a reception in a neighboring United Nations senior official’s garden, Limonov watched the diplomats, congressmen, and African heads of state from an upstairs window. He went to the basement, took Gray’s hunting rifle from its rack, loaded it, and aimed through the sights at the guests. When he recognized Kurt Waldheim, then the United Nations secretary-general, he kept him in the crosshairs as he moved through the gathering. Limonov considered firing, imagining the fame and readership the act might bring, but Waldheim went inside and Limonov lowered the possibility without acting.

These revelations make the employment relationship the central dramatic contrast of His Butler’s Story: Limonov is trusted with money, food, rooms, and guests, while the employer never fully knows the man carrying out his wishes. Gray’s manners and Limonov’s service are both genuine, but neither dissolves the underlying conflict. The butler’s discipline gives him access to the life he resents; the book later turns that access into a record of his concealed contempt, transgression, and capacity for violence.