Natasha

Natasha is Eduard Limonov’s partner and wife for thirteen years, a singer whose relationship with him moves between absence, return, physical intimacy, and separation. The book presents her less through an independent account of her life than through scenes of shared domestic space and Limonov’s recollections: a studio in Paris, a drunken reunion after a disastrous political campaign, and the bodily details that return to him after she leaves. Her decisive significance lies in the contrast between the closeness they can briefly recover and the eventual end of their life together, which leaves Limonov in conspicuous pain.

Identity and Place in Limonov’s Life

Natasha shares a studio with Limonov in Paris. Their relationship has lasted thirteen years by the time she leaves him, and he refers to her as his wife. The narration supplies little about her life apart from him: she is described as a singer, as someone who drinks heavily, and as a woman whose life in the studio has continued during his repeated absences. Those details come largely through Limonov’s experience and language, not through a separate account of her own perspective.

Her place in his life is nevertheless more than a domestic background to his political activity. When he returns from Moscow and finds her meek and gentle, as she has been after running away before, the narrator speculates that he may be thinking about their marriage and the possibility of growing old and dying beside her. That imagined future gives their reunion a tenderness that will later be set against the finality of her departure. It is presented as the narrator’s inference, not as a certainty about what Limonov thought.

Shared Life and Repeated Absence

For almost two years, Limonov is away from the Paris apartment except when passing through on his way elsewhere, caught between politics in Moscow and wars wherever they break out. When he spends the summer of 1993 in Paris, the familiar studio has become strange to him. He is unused to living there; Natasha, by contrast, has become used to living there without him and, the narration says, to sleeping with other men. Their shared address therefore records a change in their relationship: it remains a common home in name, but their daily lives have grown apart.

The difference between them is also a difference in how they inhabit the separation. Limonov returns feeling like a stranger, while Natasha has adapted to his absence. His political identity has changed as well: he no longer considers himself a writer but a fighter and professional revolutionary. Yet that self-image does not resolve the practical or emotional consequences of his returns. His involvement in politics and war has made him unwelcome to Paris friends and left him struggling to find money; at home, he encounters a relationship that has continued without him.

The Reunion After the Campaign

After a furious and humiliating electoral defeat, Limonov tries to tell Natasha what has happened, but she does not answer his call. He arrives early in the morning, knocks, waits a minute, and then uses his key. Inside, she lies sprawled across the bed among empty bottles and full ashtrays, snoring heavily. The room has not been aired for several days and smells awful. He sets down his bag and silently begins cleaning. The action briefly reverses their familiar positions: the returning political fighter becomes the caretaker of a neglected room, while Natasha watches from the bed.

She opens one eye, props herself up on an elbow, and tells him, “You can yell at me later, right now I need you to fuck me.” He joins her, and the narration describes them clutching each other like castaways. Their encounter restores physical closeness, but it does not make their shared life secure. Afterward, Natasha says she has spent three days in the room, getting banged by two strangers, and jokes that if Limonov had arrived earlier he could have met them and they could have played cards. Her shrill laugh leaves the scene suspended between blunt disclosure, provocation, and the intimacy of a reunion. The text does not present the encounter as a reconciliation that settles what has gone wrong between them.

Limonov dresses without changing, picks up his bag, and leaves without a word. He closes the door without slamming it, takes the metro and then the commuter train to Roissy Airport, and buys a ticket to Budapest. His controlled departure contrasts with the disorder of the room and the intensity of the encounter. The episode makes their attachment visible, but also shows how little that attachment can promise: after returning to her bed, he leaves again almost immediately.

Departure and Limonov’s Recollection

Later, Natasha leaves Limonov for good. The narrator, Emmanuel Carrère, says he knows little about the reasons or circumstances; Limonov’s writing at this point is less personal than it had been in his youth. The account therefore distinguishes what can be established—the end of a thirteen-year relationship—from the fuller explanation the narrative cannot provide. It does not turn Natasha’s departure into a complete, independently narrated story.

Limonov’s immediate response, as Carrère reads it, is as convulsive as his reaction when Tanya left him. In a hurried, borderline-delirious text, he gives the breakup a philosophical and mystical interpretation, describing disturbing coincidences, prophetic dreams, hallucinated wanderings, and an encounter with the devil in the streets of Moscow. He also consults a psychic, who tells him that in a past life he was a Teutonic Knight and Natasha was a prostitute under his protection. Limonov finds the story telling and casts himself as the faithful, valiant protector betrayed by the woman he protected. The interpretation reveals his effort to shape abandonment into a story about loyalty and betrayal; it does not establish why Natasha left.

His thoughts repeatedly return from that grand frame to the particular body and habits of the woman he has lost. Walking through the stifling Moscow summer until he is nearly exhausted, he chants to himself a catalogue of her large, supple hands and sagging breasts, and remembers her naked in their Paris studio, smoking as she masturbated on the toilet while he watched through the open door. He remembers that she excited him like no other woman in his life except Tanya. The recollections are intimate and deliberately unidealized: desire, tenderness, resentment, and humiliation remain entangled rather than resolving into a single verdict on Natasha.

Narrative Role and Significance

Natasha’s story is shaped by a marked limit of knowledge. Carrère explicitly acknowledges that he does not know much about the circumstances of her final departure, while Limonov’s own writing supplies a highly charged interpretation rather than a reliable account of her motives. This gap matters: the narrative does not mistake the intensity of Limonov’s grief for access to Natasha’s side of the breakup. She remains partly unknowable, even as his recollections make her vividly present.

The earlier reunion and the later separation also give the relationship its central pattern. Limonov returns to a home that has become strange; he silently cleans while Natasha watches; they recover closeness in bed; he leaves again. Later, she leaves him, and his political explanations and mystical visions cannot undo the loss. The contrast is not between feeling and indifference, but between powerful intimacy and the limits of what intimacy can preserve. Natasha’s departure thus interrupts Limonov’s self-fashioning as fighter and revolutionary with a private defeat that he can describe, mythologize, and desire his way through, but cannot reverse.