Olga Matitch

Olga Matitch is a White Russian scholar who teaches Russian literature at Berkeley and knew Eduard Limonov during his years in the United States. She enters the narrative when the biographer is struggling to understand Limonov and fears that the account may be going wrong. Her long friendship with Limonov and her insistence on his decency offer a counterjudgment to the hostility he provokes—and a way to hold that judgment beside the violence and political choices that make it difficult to accept.

Identity and Connection

The narrator meets Matitch in San Francisco through the film producer Tom Luddy, who suggests that they have dinner with a friend who knows Limonov well. Matitch is then in her sixties. Her connection to Limonov reaches back to his time in the United States, before the narrator’s interview with her becomes a point of reflection on how to represent him.

A Dissenting Reader of Limonov

After It’s Me, Eddie appeared, people interested in Slavic literature, both French and American, quickly settled on hating its author. Matitch was an exception. She remained on good terms with Limonov, taught classes on his work, and visited him when she was in Moscow. By the time the narrator speaks with her, she has liked and admired him for thirty years. Her view is therefore not presented as a passing response to the book or as an endorsement formed at a distance: it rests on a sustained acquaintance with both the writer and the person she believes him to be.

Matitch’s assessment is striking in its plainness. She tells the narrator, “God knows I’ve met writers, and above all Russian writers. I’ve met them all. And the only really good man among them is Limonov. Really, he’s one of the most decent men I’ve met in my life.” Against the broad rejection that followed the novel’s publication, her judgment gives Limonov a reputation among writers that his public image would seem to make improbable.

What She Means by Decency

The narrator understands Matitch’s word “decent” through George Orwell’s idea of “common decency”: a virtue made up of honesty and common sense, suspicion of grand language, respect for one’s word, realism about reality, and attentiveness to other people. In this account, decency is not a glamorous intellectual doctrine. It is a practical moral quality associated more often with ordinary people than with upper-class society, and described as rare among intellectuals.

The narrator also marks the limits of his confidence in Matitch’s judgment. He finds it hard to imagine such decency as a halo over Limonov while Limonov shoots in the direction of Sarajevo or plots with Colonel Viktor Alksnis. Matitch, reassuringly, has difficulty reconciling those actions with her estimate of him too. Her admiration does not erase the contradiction, and the narrator’s respect for her does not make that contradiction disappear.

Moral Counterpoint and Narrative Role

The importance of Matitch’s testimony lies partly in the narrator’s explicit account of why he trusts it. He describes her as intelligent and civilized, and as a profoundly good woman, while acknowledging that this is an impression rather than proof. He says he trusts that impression, as he does his impression of Zakhar Prilepin. Matitch’s testimony thus becomes a test of the biographer’s own moral perception: it asks him to take seriously a judgment he cannot simply reconcile with Limonov’s political and wartime conduct.

Even so, the narrator can sometimes see what Matitch means. He identifies Limonov’s time in prison as perhaps the high point of his life, when he came closest to being the hero he had tried to become with courage and childlike doggedness. Matitch does not make the narrator’s doubts vanish; rather, her account helps him recognize a particular part of Limonov’s life in which the claim to decency and heroism seems most visible. Her role is to keep that possibility in view without turning it into an uncomplicated absolution.