Steven Gray
LimonovSteven Gray is a multimillionaire and New York employer whose household becomes a vantage point from which Eduard Limonov observes wealth at close range. He is neither the tyrant nor the simple capitalist caricature that Limonov expects: Steven is often considerate, cultivated, and hospitable. Yet his inherited security, and the ease with which he moves through a world closed to his employee, intensify Limonov’s resentment. The two men’s relationship is therefore marked by genuine personal warmth and a profound inequality that Steven does not appear to recognize.
Identity and Social Position
In Limonov’s account, Steven is forty, good-looking, and a bon vivant whose fortune is inherited. He lives with his wife and three children in a sumptuous Connecticut manor, and sometimes stays in a pied-à-terre on Sutton Place in New York City. Jenny, his employee, lives there full time; a secretary handles the mail, and a Haitian cleaning lady helps maintain the apartment. Steven’s larger Connecticut household has about ten staff. The people who work for him wait for his visits with some apprehension, though he comes infrequently and usually stays less than a week.
Limonov also calls him Gatsby, but the narrator rejects the comparison: Steven’s inherited wealth and settled confidence put him at odds with the self-made, aspiring figure that name suggests. He has friends among artists and once lost a million dollars producing an avant-garde film, but neither that venture nor his cultural interests place his economic position in doubt. The contrast between money inherited and money risked becomes one of the facts Limonov studies most closely.
A Liberal Manner and Its Limits
Steven can be impatient and prone to anger over small matters, though he later apologizes. He makes a point of showing that he is a liberal employer: he addresses Jenny by her first name, invites her to call him Steven, and extends the same invitation to Limonov. He does not summon Jenny with a bell or expect breakfast to be carried upstairs. Instead, he comes to the kitchen himself and politely asks whether he may take the copy of The New York Times that Limonov is reading. Limonov would like to refuse, but instead assures him that the paper is waiting for him.
The courtesy does not erase the employer’s expectations. Steven still expects his tea to be properly brewed and his toast freshly made when he wakes. The scene captures the gap between his informal manners and the labor that quietly organizes his comfort. Limonov notices both: Steven’s consideration seems real, but so does the household’s dependence on service. His later outburst over a pair of trousers delayed at the cleaners offers a sharper example of that imbalance. Steven apologizes an hour afterward, believing the matter settled; Limonov, according to his own account, was so enraged that he might have fetched a kitchen knife had the outburst lasted longer. The threat is presented as Limonov’s claim, not as an action carried out.
Russian Connections and the New Employee
Steven’s interest in Russia is personal as well as cultural. His grandmother was a White Russian who emigrated after the Russian Revolution and spoke Russian to him when he was a child. He retains only a few words, which the narrator says he pronounces with the accent of the former regime. He welcomes Russians passing through New York City and is delighted to have an authentic Russian poet as an almost live-in guest. In conversation, he is drawn to Limonov’s accounts of life in the Soviet Union, including his time in a psychiatric hospital and his troubles with the Committee for State Security. Limonov, aware of the stories that appeal to his audience, heightens them and supplies the expected deference.
The arrangement changes when Jenny is preparing to leave for California to join her fiancé. Steven is sorry to lose her and has not found a replacement. By then, Limonov has spent months helping around the house: repairing a table leg, oiling garden tools, and making borscht that the guests enjoy. He knows the household and Steven’s habits, and the idea of employing a Russian poet as a butler appeals to Steven’s snobbery. He hires Limonov, who proves unusually capable. He manages the staff, handles visitors and deliveries, reserves expensive cuts of meat at Ottomanelli’s, and cooks both Russian dishes and vegetables unfamiliar to his previous diet. Steven trusts him to collect ten thousand dollars in cash from the bank. Limonov also learns how Steven likes his whiskey and how to serve guests without drawing attention to himself. His discretion is part of the job, though wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt beneath his livery and joining certain guests’ conversations lets him retain a visible trace of his own identity. Steven’s friends envy the arrangement, and Limonov becomes a subject of talk in Manhattan.
Intimacy, Inequality, and Resentment
Steven’s hospitality gives Limonov access to a wealthy social world, but not equality within it. After watching Steven prepare to wear a ten-thousand-dollar suit and dine at a restaurant where the cheapest meal would cost a Puerto Rican family a month’s food budget, Limonov imagines how the millionaire would manage if forced to survive on his wits alone in the jungle. At close quarters, however, Steven does not resemble the Soviet caricature of a bloated, cruel capitalist. Limonov recognizes him as humane and civilized, but this recognition does not settle the question of why one man possesses so much while another does not. In Limonov’s thinking, the answer becomes revolution: not gradual reform, but violence.
This political fantasy grows out of proximity rather than distance. Steven’s ordinary kindness does not lessen the material gulf between employer and employee; it makes the gulf more difficult to reduce to a simple portrait of individual evil. Steven can welcome Limonov, listen to his stories, and offer work, while remaining the beneficiary of an inheritance and a class position Limonov cannot share. The relationship thus exposes a contradiction in Limonov’s resentment: he observes that Steven is a decent person, yet sees no reason that decency should justify the distribution of wealth around him.
The Butler’s Private Reversal
Limonov’s memoir, His Butler’s Story, reveals a private life Steven could not see. When Steven is away, Limonov leaves his small room under the roof and takes over the master bedroom. He sprawls on the silk sheets, smokes joints in the bathtub, tries on Steven’s clothes, walks barefoot on the carpets, searches the drawers, and drinks his Château Margaux. He also brings women home, sometimes two at a time, and presents himself to them as the master of the house or Steven’s equal. The episode reverses the visible hierarchy of the household, but only temporarily: Limonov can occupy the room and imitate the owner in private, while remaining his employee in public.
The narrator imagines that these breaches might not have troubled Steven as much as what Limonov thought while serving him. That distinction is important: the book does not establish that Steven actually read it or how he responded. The narrator speculates that he might have remembered their quarrel over the delayed trousers, and the scenes Limonov discloses make their apparently cordial routine look less secure than it seemed. The memoir’s publication also changes the record of the relationship: the employer who had invited an intimate Russian poet into his home becomes a character in the butler’s account of concealed anger and borrowed privilege.
The Reception and the Unfired Shot
A reception next door at the home of a senior United Nations official brings the class divide into its most dangerous form. Steven attends as a neighbor, drinking champagne in a candlelit garden among diplomats, their wives, congressmen, and two African heads of state. From a top-floor window, Limonov watches a party to which he knows he would never be invited. His anger drives him down to the basement, where he takes Steven’s hunting rifle from its rack and loads it.
Among the guests is Kurt Waldheim, whom Limonov recognizes from television. Steven exchanges a few words with him; Limonov tracks them through the rifle’s sights. As Waldheim moves among the guests, Limonov keeps him in the crosshairs and feels his finger twitch on the trigger. He imagines that firing would make him famous overnight and bring attention to his writing, including Diary of a Loser. When Waldheim goes inside, Limonov does not shoot. The moment ends with the thought that he is not yet ready. Steven, meanwhile, remains unaware that his butler had watched him at the reception with a loaded rifle. The episode completes the portrait of a relationship in which Steven’s trust and Limonov’s service coexist with a private hostility whose consequences nearly escape the household.
