Emmanuel Carrère

Emmanuel Carrère is the author and narrator whose attempt to understand Eduard Limonov becomes the organizing inquiry of the book. Their relationship begins with a phone call after years without contact, but its deeper basis is a contrast Carrère sees between their lives: his own relative continuity and Limonov’s extreme changes of place and social identity. Carrère does not present that contrast as a verdict. He uses it to ask what Limonov’s life can reveal about Russia and the postwar world, while leaving open what its meaning ultimately is.

Background and Perspective

Carrère describes himself as born into a bourgeois family in Paris’s Sixteenth Arrondissement and as having become a bourgeois bohemian in the Tenth. His father was a senior executive, his mother the historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, and Carrère wrote books and screenplays; his wife was a journalist. His parents had a vacation home on the Île de Ré, and he hoped to buy one on Patmos. He does not condemn this comfortable background, but notes that neither geographically nor socially had his life carried him far from its starting point. He extends the observation to most of his friends, making his own rootedness a deliberate counterpoint to Limonov’s mobility.

His early family memories also include his mother’s first book, Marxism and Asia, which impressed him although, as a child, he could not get past its opening words. He and his sisters turned that opening into a family joke, objecting that the book assumed knowledge they did not possess. The memory links Carrère’s childhood to his mother’s scholarly work on Central Asia while showing his instinct for puncturing an authoritative voice with a comic, personal response.

Carrère’s account of Limonov emphasizes the number of lives contained in one biography: a young punk in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, a bum, a multimillionaire’s butler in Manhattan, a fashionable writer in Paris, a soldier in the Balkans, and, in post-communist disorder, an elderly leader of young militants. Carrère recognizes that Limonov sees himself as a hero, while others might judge him harshly; rather than settle the dispute in advance, he suspends judgment. The decisive stimulus for the book is the scale of the transformation, which makes Limonov’s life seem to Carrère significant beyond the individual and beyond Russia.

The First Call and the Beginning of the Project

After tracking Limonov down, Carrère obtained his mobile number from Moscow editor Sasha Ivanov. Before dialing, he hesitated over what role to adopt: old friend or guarded journalist, Russian or French, formal or informal speech. He remembers the hesitation but not what he said when Limonov answered. Limonov recognized him immediately and asked whether he had been at the Dubrovka ceremony the previous year.

Carrère was astonished. At the ceremony he had watched Limonov from about a hundred yards away; they had exchanged only a brief glance, and Carrère had seen no sign that he was recognized. He later considered whether Sasha Ivanov could have told Limonov about the planned call, but he had not told Sasha he had attended the ceremony. Carrère eventually understood the recognition as evidence of Limonov’s unusually powerful memory and self-control. When Carrère proposed a long article and spending a couple of weeks with him, Limonov agreed, while allowing for the possibility that he might be sent back to prison.

The disparity between Limonov’s worlds gave Carrère a more specific reason to pursue the project. He sets the image of Limonov as a prisoner in a forced-labor camp on the Volga against that of a fashionable writer among Philippe Starck interiors in New York. Carrère describes the distance between those circumstances as a source of pride for Limonov, and admits that he understands the feeling. The contrast does not merely furnish a dramatic biography: it prompts the book’s question about what such a life can disclose. Carrère presents the inquiry as unfinished, writing in order to find out what, beyond Limonov and Russia, the story might mean.

Reporting, Retrospection, and Uncertainty

Carrère later returns to the beginning of his reporting in Moscow. Limonov had been out of prison for four years when the reporting started; Carrère says he initially knew little of the history subsequently recounted and spent almost four more years gathering it. Even then, he had a confused sense that something was wrong, as if Limonov were still performing himself for an audience. Carrère describes Limonov’s post-release public image as that of an idolized writer and urbane freedom fighter, suitable for society-page attention. He also recounts Limonov’s departure from Nastia for a celebrated actress, his prison years’ contribution to his popularity, and his alliance with Garry Kasparov as a route to social respectability. These details are part of Carrère’s retrospective reading of Limonov’s public transformation, not a claim that the performance can be separated cleanly from the person.

That caution extends to Carrère’s treatment of stories Limonov tells about himself. In recounting an incident involving a violinist, Carrère notes that the story could initially seem credible because Limonov had no obvious need to volunteer it. But the episode had already circulated through an eyewitness account by a Hungarian photographer, in which Limonov’s conduct appeared cruel. Carrère therefore considers the possibility that Limonov’s version was an attempt to cover more disgraceful behavior. He rejects that explanation as his own likely reading, saying he does not believe Limonov is vile or a liar, but does not claim certainty. The episode shows Carrère testing a narrated scene against its circulation and competing accounts rather than treating a vivid personal anecdote as self-validating.

Carrère also presents Limonov’s resentment of literary admiration as part of the portrait, not as a neutral judgment on the writers involved. In the account of Limonov’s underground circle, he notes that Limonov admired Vadim Delaunay, thought less of Venichka Erofeev, and disliked literary cults that drew attention away from himself. Joseph Brodsky’s arrival in Moscow’s literary kitchens particularly unsettled the young poet who had been their star. By preserving both Limonov’s judgments and the circumstances that complicate them, Carrère makes rivalry and self-fashioning visible within the biographical record.

Narrative Role and the Book’s Frame

Carrère’s position shifts between participant and investigator. He recalls his own uncertainty on the phone and his astonishment at being recognized, then revisits the limits of what he knew when reporting began. The resulting account is not presented as an uninterrupted chronology: the return to the 2009 Moscow frame places the completed retrospective investigation beside the earlier encounter that initiated it. Carrère’s admission of a gap in his memory and his account of later research make the construction of the biography part of its subject.

The ending frame also sets Carrère’s retrospective method against political events that, during the first reporting, still lay ahead. Looking back at the 2008 elections, he recalls a British journalist’s prediction and describes the arrangement in which Vladimir Putin became prime minister while Dmitry Medvedev became president. Carrère renders the partnership through the image of a driving-school car with two steering positions, then leaves the future question of who would take the wheel unresolved in the passage. The political frame enlarges the book beyond Limonov’s private life, while its open question echoes Carrère’s own stated purpose: to investigate what the life signifies rather than claim that its meaning was settled from the outset.