Vadim Delaunay

Vadim Delaunay is remembered in the book both as a kind, book-loving young man and as one of eight dissidents who publicly protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The distance between those portraits is the point: a childhood memory of a possible older brother leads, years later, to the discovery of his arrest, prison sentence, emigration, and early death.

Identity and Background

Delaunay wrote poetry and belonged to the Smogists, an avant-garde movement whose youngest member he was. The movement had already entered Eduard Limonov and Anna’s story through Brusilovsky, who had talked about it to them in Kharkov. Delaunay’s family had emigrated from France to Russia to escape the French Revolution. The book suggests that these origins helped him move in circles normally difficult to access under Brezhnev: he could visit a foreign diplomat’s home, an exceptional privilege in that period.

In Limonov’s Book of the Dead, which gathers portraits of people he had known who were no longer alive, Delaunay appears among both famous and obscure figures. Limonov describes him as barely twenty, handsome, kind, and well liked. The account offers no evidence that Delaunay’s death was caused by the drinking that figures in its broader portrait of Limonov’s dead acquaintances; its concrete emphasis is instead on Delaunay’s youth and the abruptness of his disappearance from the narrator’s life.

The Moscow Encounter

The narrator first met Delaunay in 1968, at a lunch hosted by the French cultural attaché during a history conference in Moscow. The narrator was ten. Delaunay, whom the narrator remembered as very young, handsome, and nice, took an immediate liking to the child and asked about the child’s favorite books. Since both knew Alexandre Dumas, their conversation turned to the writer’s stories and characters. To the narrator, Delaunay felt like an ideal older brother: someone who might have played games if the child had liked games, but who instead met the child through a shared love of reading.

More than forty years later, the narrator could still recite the names of the lunch’s guests. The precision of that recollection makes the later discovery especially sharp: Delaunay was not merely one memorable name among adults at a diplomatic lunch, but a young poet already moving through Moscow’s literary underground. The narrator checks the dates and considers it possible that, after lunch, Delaunay went to Arseny Tarkovsky’s seminar and witnessed Limonov’s debut there. This remains a possibility, not a confirmed meeting or event.

The Red Square Protest and Imprisonment

In August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and violently suppressed the Prague Spring. Eight dissidents then staged a demonstration on Red Square to protest the invasion. Delaunay was among them, alongside Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov, Vladimir Dremliuga, Tatiana Baeva, Viktor Fainberg, Konstantin Babitsky, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who pushed her baby in a carriage. Delaunay carried a placard bearing the words "FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS".

The protest was brief, but its consequences were severe. The demonstrators were arrested and sentenced to prison terms of varying lengths; Delaunay received two and a half years. After his release, further conflicts with the KGB followed. The book gives no further particulars about those later encounters, but places them between his imprisonment and his eventual emigration.

Exile and Retrospective Memory

Delaunay emigrated to Paris after his release and subsequent difficulties with the KGB. The narrator says that a reunion might have been possible there, but that the narrator did not know Delaunay had moved there. Delaunay died in 1983, aged thirty-five. The missed possibility of meeting again turns the childhood encounter into more than a tender anecdote: it is also a record of how political repression and emigration severed a connection before the child who remembered him could understand what had happened.

The book restores Delaunay to view through two different acts of remembrance. The narrator preserves the warmth of a conversation about Dumas; Limonov’s Book of the Dead places the same young man among the people he had known and lost. Together, the accounts hold the intimate and the political in tension: the dissident with a placard on Red Square remains also the considerate young poet who asked a child what he liked to read.