Rostov State University is the site of a five-hundred-person lecture that captures the early-1990s fascination with visitors from the West. For Emmanuel Carrère and his publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, the audience’s starry-eyed attention offered a vivid example of adulation detached from knowledge of the speakers or their work; the scene also helps frame Eduard Limonov’s more uneasy experience of celebrity in Moscow.

The lecture hall

During a trip to Russia organized by the French Cultural Services, Carrère and Otchakovsky-Laurens found themselves in a huge lecture hall at Rostov State University before five hundred people. The students knew nothing about what the two French visitors had written or published, yet received even their most anodyne remarks with stars in their eyes. The response was not earned by the content of the talk: the visitors’ Frenchness alone was enough to command the room.

The episode stayed with the two publishers as a compact memory of a particular moment. They would sometimes cheer each other up with the phrase “Remember Rostov?” The refrain makes the university more than a stop on a trip: it becomes a shorthand for an atmosphere of enthusiastic attention that, in the narrator’s account, had since disappeared.

A point of comparison

The Rostov lecture also provides a way for Carrère to imagine Limonov’s reception at a cultural-center event in Moscow’s Izmailovo Park. Limonov had long wanted to attract thousands and tower over them, but the crowd there had been drawn by Western novelty and by the publicity of Yulian Semyonov, not simply by Limonov himself. Rostov helps clarify the distinction: a packed room can look like personal triumph while its enthusiasm is directed elsewhere.

At the university, the French visitors themselves were the object of that indiscriminate fascination. In Moscow, Limonov appeared in a manufactured portrait as a literary star, while recognizing that the audience’s excitement depended on the Western image promoted around him. The contrast gives Rostov State University its narrative significance: its lecture hall preserves the uncomplicated version of foreign adulation against which Limonov’s mixture of ambition, performance, and discomfort can be measured.