Hotel Ukraina is a luxury Moscow hotel and one of the city’s seven Stalinist skyscrapers, but in Eduard Limonov’s December 1989 return it is less a reassuring refuge than a charged threshold. Its imposing architecture, noisy lobby, dim suite, and Soviet-style buffet place the vanished certainties of his former life beside the disorder and openness of a country he no longer recognizes.

Architecture and Status

The hotel’s exterior is described as a cross between a neo-Gothic bank and a Byzantine prison. Together with the other six Stalinist skyscrapers, it gives Moscow a skyline compared to Gotham. By local standards the hotel is luxurious, and its rooms are reserved for prominent guests and Party dignitaries. Its scale and status make it a place of power as well as accommodation.

For Limonov, entering the hotel carries a personal weight: as a young underground poet, he would never have dared to walk through its doors. The building’s authority is not matched by the solemnity he expects inside. Its vast, cathedral-like lobby is filled instead with the noise and bustle of a racetrack or fair.

Lobby and Suite

The lobby’s visitors and staff unsettle any impression of formal grandeur. Sinister-looking men with greasy hair and loud voices hurry through the space, and some put muddy shoes on the coffee tables. The hotel’s public rooms thus combine monumental architecture with behavior that is rough and disorderly.

Limonov’s suite is lavish by the austere Soviet standards he has grown accustomed to abroad, with ceilings at least twelve feet high. Yet a low-watt bulb leaves the room dim, and its atmosphere is compared to a butcher’s meat locker. The suite’s physical comfort does not make it welcoming; its former associations with surveillance remain present even as their reliability has become uncertain.

That uncertainty extends to communication. In the past, a call to Russians after arriving from abroad could bring serious trouble, and the room’s walls and telephone could be assumed to be bugged. Now, Limonov thinks, it seems possible to call anyone. But he has only one number with him, Natasha’s mother’s, and she does not answer. Having emigrated fifteen years earlier in the belief that he would never again be able to call his friends, he had not kept their numbers. He wonders whether they might know he has returned and meet him at Izmailovo, including old acquaintances and what remains of the Smogists, without knowing whether he wants such a reunion. The hotel is therefore also the place where the practical loss of his old connections becomes immediate.

Breakfast and Encounter

In December 1989, breakfast is still served as a Soviet-style buffet run like a factory cafeteria, rather than the sumptuous spread the hotel will offer a few years later. Waiting in line, Limonov meets Antoine Vitez, a French theater director who recognizes him and has read and liked several of his books. They eat herring and hard-boiled eggs with yolks that are almost white.

Vitez speaks some Russian and has visited the Soviet Union several times. He describes life there as serious and weighty, contrasting its restrictions with what he sees as the West’s permission without importance. Though he reluctantly accepts the changes underway, he worries that the country may lose its soul. Limonov considers it easy for someone living in comfort and freedom to want to preserve those qualities for others, but he is pleased to meet a French intellectual who is not wholly infatuated with Gorbachev and is flattered that Vitez knows his writing.

A Threshold in the Return

At the hotel, Limonov is caught between recognition and estrangement. He has returned to his native country and tries to show a Russian driver that years abroad and success have not made him a stranger to ordinary Russians, but the driver responds with guarded indifference; the hotel staff offer no warmer welcome. The suite’s unanswered call and the uncertain prospect of a reunion sharpen that isolation.

Vitez gives the hotel breakfast a different role. Seeing Limonov’s distress, he imagines his journey into the city as Orpheus’s search for Eurydice. The comparison turns the hotel from a mere stopover into the starting point of a search: from its crowded lobby and dim rooms, Limonov must go out into Moscow without knowing where to begin.