French Publication of The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks

The French publication of The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks in the fall of 1980 marked Eduard Limonov’s breakthrough from precarious obscurity into a new literary and social life. Published in France as It’s Me, Eddie under a sensational title devised by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, the book became the first of two works that would make Limonov a minor star in Paris, where Limonov lived with Natasha.

A Publisher Takes Notice

The opportunity arrived after a contact in Paris brought the book to Pauvert. Limonov did not yet know that Pauvert was a legendary, heretical publisher, associated with the Surrealists, the Marquis de Sade, and Story of O. The narrator compares Pauvert’s standing to that of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, emphasizing a career shaped by provocation and defiance of official standards.

Pauvert had been convicted ten times for breaches of moral standards or for insulting the head of state, yet repeatedly re-emerged from professional and legal setbacks. His decision to publish the book followed his reading of a couple of translated chapters: that limited sample was enough to win him over. The encounter thus joined a provocative novel to a publisher whose own history made him a fitting advocate for it.

Publication Amid Setbacks

The deal was not straightforward. Pauvert’s publishing company had gone bankrupt again, so he had to find refuge for the book at another publisher. The obstacle threatened the practical arrangements, but not the decision itself: Pauvert was committed, and the essential question was whether the book would appear. It did, in France in the fall of 1980.

Pauvert supplied the striking title The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks. The title framed the French edition as an audacious provocation, giving it an identity distinct from the original title, It’s Me, Eddie. Its sensational quality was not incidental to the book’s reception: the novel’s arrival placed Limonov’s deliberately provocative persona before a new audience.

Reception and Consequences

The French publication of It’s Me, Eddie, followed by Diary of a Loser, turned Limonov into a bit of a star. The first years of his Paris stay were, in the narrator’s assessment, the happiest of his life: he had narrowly escaped misery and anonymity, and found an audience among fashionable young people rather than chiefly among serious publishers and literary circles.

That audience responded to his unusual appearance, awkward French, and casually provocative remarks. In a milieu defined by cynicism, disillusionment, and an icy good cheer, his cruel jokes about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and toasts to Joseph Stalin suited the moment. The surrounding post-punk fashion also borrowed Soviet imagery: large Politburo-style glasses, Komsomol insignia, and photographs of Leonid Brezhnev kissing Honecker. Limonov was first astonished, then moved, to see a hypertrendy young designer wearing snap-up plastic boots like those his mother had worn in Kharkov in the early fifties. The novel’s publication therefore did more than secure a French edition: it carried Limonov’s Soviet-inflected image into a scene ready to turn it into fashion.