Raya, who discussed Gorbachev and multiparty politics

Raya, Eduard Limonov’s mother, comes into view during his visit to his parents after years away. She is at once a caregiver, keeper of household provisions, and witness to a way of life that finds safety in routine and regards political change with suspicion. Through her, the visit becomes more than a reunion: it sets Eduard’s experience abroad against the constricted, familiar world his parents still inhabit.

Identity and Household Life

Raya lives with Venyamin Savenko, now an old man who clutches the furniture as he makes his way to the bedroom. She tells Eduard that Venyamin suffered a heart attack a year earlier and has not wanted to do anything since. She must dress and undress him; he almost never leaves the apartment, and she seldom does either, except to shop. The work of looking after him shapes both their days and the limits of her own movements.

The city centre frightens Raya, while home feels safe. She repeats, “Here it’s calm,” a reassurance that also carries the narrator’s suggestion that she may be hoping Eduard will settle in with them. Her cupboards are part of that security. To show that the household lacks for nothing, she displays its stores: sixty pounds of sugar, bags of buckwheat, and more provisions in the cellar. Preparedness is tangible and domestic, a defence against the possibility of shortage.

Care, Routine, and the Visit

The household’s routines also include the gas flame left burning on the stove. Eduard wants to turn it off, but Raya objects: it keeps the apartment warm and, she says, keeps them company, like someone in the room. When he explains that gas in Paris, where Eduard Limonov lived with Natasha, would have cost him thousands of francs, the comparison catches her attention. She is astonished that a state could make people pay so much for gas, then wonders whether Gorbachev and his supporters want to introduce the same arrangement at home.

Eduard’s first impulse is to return to Moscow that evening, but he decides that leaving so soon would be cruel. It is his first visit to his parents in years and, he believes, will probably be his last, so he stays for a week. The stay feels to him like a sentence to be served: he marks off the days on a calendar. Each morning he exercises for an hour with his old weights; on his childhood bed he rereads Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, eats three heavy meals, and makes himself endure prickly conversations with his mother. Venyamin, by contrast, says nothing.

Raya fills those conversations with the minutiae of her day. When describing a letter, she recounts the walk to the post office, the queue at the counter, the exchange with the clerk, and the bus stops on the way home. The narrative presents this abundance of detail as a way of passing time, and as a striking contrast to Eduard’s impatience with the visit. For Raya, omitting the small steps would leave the account incomplete; for her son, the week is something to count down.

Politics and the Wider World

Raya’s response to Gorbachev is not an abstract political debate. His proposed changes become alarming when connected to ordinary costs and household security: the prospect of paying for gas seems to her as unreasonable as the idea of having several political parties. Outside the larger cities and intellectual circles, the narrative observes, hostility to Gorbachev is widely shared, and this common sentiment comforts Eduard somewhat.

When Raya asks what people want instead, Eduard explains that they want multiple parties, as in France. She looks at him in horror. Multiparty politics seems to her as barbarous as making people pay for gas. The two comparisons bring political change down to the level of domestic expectation: what appears to Eduard as a possible civic arrangement appears to his mother as a threat to the settled order of daily life.

Family Memory and Separation

During the visit, Eduard asks what has become of his boyhood friends. Raya recounts the fate of Kostya, known as the Cat, who served twelve years in a prison camp and was stabbed in a fight a few days after his release. He is dead, and his parents are slowly dying of grief. Kadik, once a dandy who dreamed of becoming a saxophonist, still works at the Hammer and Sickle. After his partner Lydia left him, he returned to his mother’s home and raised his daughter; the daughter grew up and left, while Kadik remained with his mother and drank too much. Raya ventures that he would be happy to see Eduard, but Eduard declines.

Her stories place the absent friends alongside the parents’ physical decline: one boyhood companion is dead, another remains in a life narrowed by loss and drinking, and Venyamin and Raya are living within increasingly confined routines. Raya can offer Eduard the details, the food stores, the warm room, and the possibility of seeing Kadik, but she cannot make the reunion into a lasting return. His week with his parents ends as an interval he has deliberately endured, while her wish for calm and continuity remains tied to the apartment and its daily habits.