Embassy Hotel

The Embassy Hotel becomes Eduard Limonov’s chosen refuge from the Russian émigré community in New York: a shabbier lodging whose residents and street-level social world offer a stark alternative to the company he has grown tired of. The hotel’s significance lies in that deliberate change of address, which makes Limonov’s outsider status visible and gives new force to the stories circulating about him.

Setting and Residents

Limonov carries his suitcase from the Winslow Hotel, the émigrés’ headquarters, to the Embassy Hotel, which the narrative describes as even shabbier. Its residents are exclusively black people, drug addicts, and sex workers of both sexes. The starkly different population makes the move more than a change of lodging: Limonov leaves a community he has wanted to belong to, but has also had enough of, for a place that unsettles the social boundaries surrounding him.

Limonov’s Life at the Hotel

Limonov is the hotel’s only white resident, yet he does not feel out of place. Carol’s observation that he dresses like a black man helps explain that sense of fit. When he earns a dollar or two helping move a rabbi, he spends the money on secondhand clothes chosen to attract attention: pink-and-white suits, lace-collared shirts, mauve crushed-velvet jackets, and ankle boots with two-tone heels. The outfits earn him the respect of his neighbors, turning clothing into a means of finding recognition in a setting where he stands out by race and style alike.

Rumor and the View from His Window

The hotel also changes what the Russian émigrés say about Limonov. Rumors that he had been queer, a KGB man, or had killed himself give way to claims that he lives with two black sex workers and acts as their pimp. His loyal companion Lenya Kosogor repeats the stories because he knows they will please Limonov. The gossip makes the hotel a point of contrast between Limonov’s public reputation and the life he has chosen to inhabit.

From his window, Limonov can see the roof of a small house on Columbus Avenue shared by Gennady Smakov and two gay dancers. Smakov, a generous and erudite man fluent in five languages and able to recite fifty ballets, connects the hotel’s immediate surroundings to New York’s Russian literary and artistic circles. Joseph Brodsky and Limonov, who had rarely seen eye to eye, find common ground in their affection for Smakov and in the provincial background they associate with his dandyism. The view therefore keeps Limonov near the émigré world he has left, even as the hotel places him among very different neighbors.