It’s Me, Eddie

It’s Me, Eddie is the novel Eduard Limonov wrote during a summer in the meadows of Central Park, a manuscript whose early life unfolded through personal confidences, rival literary judgments, and precarious attempts to reach publishers. Its reception mattered not only as a practical question of publication: each reader’s response became a verdict on the audacious modern writer Limonov believed himself to be. First praised by Gennady Smakov, then judged more harshly by Joseph Brodsky, the book eventually found a French publisher under a title that recast it for the market: The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks.

Composition and first reader

Limonov gave the manuscript to Smakov before showing it to anyone else. The gesture registered an unusual degree of trust in a man who occupied a modest position among the Russian émigrés in New York. Smakov was less celebrated than Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov and benefited from their connections for translation and writing work; Limonov, meanwhile, disliked the brilliant social world in which he felt reduced to a supporting role. Yet Smakov’s hospitality and personal warmth made him a close presence, and he became the novel’s first reader.

Smakov was impressed by the book’s deliberately disreputable force. He compared its protagonist, Eddie, to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and began calling him Rodion and the manuscript It’s Me, Roddie. The comparison was not simply an accusation of conventional literary influence. Smakov thought Limonov’s young scoundrel possessed a modernity missing from the more established émigré writers. He set Vladimir Nabokov’s academic respectability and Joseph Brodsky’s classical, Eliot-like stature against the rougher contemporary charge he heard in Eddie, likening that energy to Lou Reed rather than Prokofiev or Britten. His distinction was about artistic mode, not a claim that popular modernity was inherently superior: Smakov said he personally preferred the classical composers, even as he considered a Lou Reed performance at the Factory more modern than Romeo and Juliet at the Met.

Circulation and conflicting judgments

Limonov welcomed Smakov’s enthusiasm without being astonished by it; he already considered the book brilliant. He let Smakov circulate the manuscript among his acquaintances like samizdat, beginning with two figures who stood among his own heroes, Brodsky and Baryshnikov. The informal route made the novel’s reception inseparable from the networks of émigré culture: access depended on personal connections, and praise or disapproval acquired force from the standing of the person giving it.

Brodsky’s response was slow and unfavorable. He took a long time to read the manuscript and, the narration suggests, may not have finished it. Like Smakov, he associated it with Dostoyevsky, but his comparison sharply altered the implication: Eddie seemed to him closer not to Raskolnikov but to Svidrigailov, the more perverse and violent figure in Crime and Punishment. The difference between those readings was substantial. Smakov’s comparison made Eddie a dangerous modern heir to a canonical protagonist; Brodsky’s placed him nearer the novel’s sickest and most morally compromised presence.

Baryshnikov’s response was more immediately absorbed and less openly judgmental. During ballet rehearsals, whenever he had a free moment, he slipped away to read the manuscript. He was fascinated, but Brodsky’s influence was so strong that he did not dare contradict him. Limonov therefore received two kinds of encouragement that could not settle the question: Smakov’s outspoken praise and Baryshnikov’s private absorption, checked by deference to Brodsky. With Brodsky and Baryshnikov unavailable to confront directly, Limonov turned his anger on Smakov, insulting him as a parasite and a toady to the famous. The quarrel exposed how quickly the manuscript’s circulation could change from a sign of confidence into a source of humiliation and resentment.

The American submission

A separate publishing route began with Steven Gray’s practical advice. When Gray asked about Limonov’s projects and learned that he had written a book, he urged him to have at least part of it translated and shown to an agent, offering an introduction to one he knew. Limonov followed the suggestion and used his small allowance to pay for an English translation of the first four chapters. The translated portion ran through the scene in which Limonov and Chris have sex in a sandbox; the agent then submitted it to Macmillan.

The answer did not arrive at once, and Limonov understood that delay as normal, but waiting became an exercise in imagining the unknown judgment ahead. One morning he went to look at the building where the decision would be made. At its entrance, two postal workers pushed a cart of large envelopes. Limonov estimated that it held between seventy and a hundred cubic feet of manuscripts, making the scale of competition almost physical. Somewhere above, an unidentified reader might open his envelope, encounter the English title, and continue—or might dismiss the pages without a second thought.

His imagination supplied both possible outcomes. The reader might recognize a new Henry Miller and carry the discovery to the publisher’s senior office; just as plausibly, the manuscript might join the rejects. Limonov even tried to guess the reader’s identity from a young man entering the building in a suit and tie, wearing frameless glasses and moving with the confidence of someone who knew the place. The scene turns submission into a drama of visibility and chance: the book’s fate appears to depend on a stranger’s tastes, while Limonov can do nothing but construct that stranger in his mind. The American route did not secure the breakthrough he wanted; later, publishers who had initially refused his books would translate them for the United States market.

French publication and significance

After a year in Gray’s employment, a French publisher accepted the book, and Limonov flew to Paris with his former employer’s sincere good wishes. The decisive intervention came through Jean-Jacques Pauvert, to whom someone in Paris had brought the book. Pauvert was an established and controversial publisher, associated with the Surrealists, the Marquis de Sade, and Story of O, and had repeatedly faced convictions over moral standards or insults to the head of state. He was won over by a couple of translated chapters and chose to publish the novel, despite complications caused by the renewed bankruptcy of his own publishing company and the need to find another publisher to shelter the project.

In the fall of 1980, the book appeared in France as The Russian Poet Prefers Big Blacks, the sensational title Pauvert supplied. The change made the novel’s public identity different from the manuscript Limonov had first placed in Smakov’s hands: a work read through comparisons with Dostoyevsky and debates about modernity was presented to French readers through an arresting, provocative label. The book’s route thus preserves its competing meanings rather than resolving them. To Smakov it was startlingly contemporary; to Brodsky its central figure belonged to a darker Dostoyevskian lineage; to an American agent it was a set of chapters submitted into a mass of competing manuscripts; and to Pauvert it was publishable under a title built to provoke attention. It’s Me, Eddie became both a literary work and the contested object through which Limonov’s ambition, vulnerability to judgment, and eventual public arrival were made visible.