Nastia

Nastia enters Eduard Limonov’s story as a teenage admirer and becomes the woman whose promise to wait for him gives his imprisonment an intimate, precarious future. In The Book of Water, their relationship is set against Limonov’s memories of other women, but its defining question is not simply whether Nastia loves him: it is whether his need for that love can coexist with her right to an independent life.

Identity and introduction

Nastia was sixteen when she met Limonov, and, though she was nearly five feet two inches tall, looked twelve. The narrator describes her as a petite punk: timid and introverted, “almost autistic” in his characterization, and not the spectacular beauty he associates with Tanya, Natasha, and Liza. That contrast matters to the account. Nastia’s importance does not rest on the glamour the book attributes to Limonov’s other partners; it grows from the intensity of her attention to him and from the life she imagines at his side.

Before their romance, Nastia had already made Limonov an object of worship. On her private altar of transgressive figures, the scandalous writer stood between the rocker Marilyn Manson and the Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. The book’s arrangement turns this youthful admiration into a striking reversal: Limonov first becomes her idol, then, while in prison, begins to worship her in return. His memories of their two years together are presented as treasured episodes, set apart like jewels among the other women and places in The Book of Water.

A life built around Limonov

Their early closeness appears in ordinary acts of care. Limonov bought Nastia ice cream and helped her with homework. When they walked hand in hand beside the Neva in St. Petersburg or the Yenisey in Krasnoyarsk, passersby took them for father and daughter. The mistaken impression makes visible the age difference that their private bond might otherwise obscure: in prison, Limonov himself would reckon that forty years separated them.

The narrative does not present Nastia as merely a figure in Limonov’s memories. It also shows the hopes and fears he attaches to her future. By the time he is imprisoned, he is anxious about what may be happening to her outside: whether she has forgotten him or is seeing other people. He claims to be clearheaded and realistic about fidelity, and does not expect former partners such as Tanya, Natasha, or Liza to wait for him. With Nastia, however, he makes an exception. He hopes she is waiting, believes she is waiting, and knows that discovering otherwise would drive him mad.

That exception exposes the strain within his claim to realism. The possibility that Nastia may live as other people do is not an abstraction to him; it is a source of torment. Her devotion offers him reassurance, but it also makes him depend on a young woman whose life is continuing beyond the prison walls, beyond his knowledge and control.

The prison visits and the promise

During a visit, Nastia is twenty and has come from Moscow. She and Limonov are separated by a pane of glass, and their half-hour together is made up partly of details from her life beyond the prison: she is a first-year student in a journalism program and takes odd jobs to pay for her studies, selling ice cream and caring for dogs in a kennel. She asks whether she can bring a pit bull home. Limonov laughs and replies, “I’d rather you come home with a dog than with a guy.” The joke carries an edge of possessiveness, even as the visit lets her describe a life of work and study that is not reducible to him.

Limonov wonders whether he has the right to ask her to wait. He considers telling her not to do so: she should keep her distance, live her own life, and find a boy her own age, because he does not know how long he will remain in prison. He cannot make himself say it. His need for her love is part of the reason, as the narrator observes, but Limonov also presents the refusal as respect for her ambitions. He imagines that releasing Nastia from the promise would insult her by treating her as an ordinary person, when she wants to be exceptional: a heroine, and the one woman worthy of the hero he believes himself to be.

The scene makes the promise reciprocal in feeling but unequal in circumstance. Limonov is the prisoner, facing an uncertain sentence; Nastia is outside, young and beginning her education. Yet he frames her choice through the heroic role she might play in his life. When he asks whether she intends to wait a long time, her astonished look seems to him unlike any he has encountered before. She answers, “I’ll wait for you forever.” The declaration confirms his sense that she loves him as no one else has, but it does not resolve the doubts he has already raised about whether he should accept such a pledge.

Separation and retrospective significance

The promise is not the final outcome. Looking back from his reporting in Moscow in December 2009, the narrator says that after Limonov came out of prison he dumped the courageous Nastia for a beautiful actress who had become famous in a soap opera. The prison years had helped turn Limonov into a public figure: the idolized writer and urbane freedom fighter he had dreamed of becoming. The retrospective account therefore places the intimate pledge beside its reversal. Nastia’s faith is central to the prison narrative, but Limonov does not remain faithful to the life that faith seemed to promise.

The contrast gives Nastia’s story its particular weight within the book. While Limonov’s prison reflections cast her as the exceptional woman who might stand by him when others would not, the later account shows that she is the one left behind when he returns to public life. Her arc is thus recorded through two incompatible images: the girl who promises to wait forever, and the woman whom Limonov subsequently leaves. The book does not give a further account of her life after the separation; its emphasis is on the promise, the dependence it sustains during his imprisonment, and the reversal that follows his release.