LE MONDE'S OPINION - MUST WATCH

Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, better known as Eduard Limonov, was born on February 22, 1943, in the Soviet Union and died on March 17, 2020, in Russia. He was the son of an NKVD officer and grew up in the Ukraine. Between these two dates, his colorful destiny took him between New York and Paris, before a thunderous return to his homeland. He was a delinquent, a poet, a novelist, a butler, a tramp, a mercenary and a red fascist activist. The man, who dreamed of a life filled with the intensification of strong alcohol and burned it as much as his strength allowed, described himself in this quest for adventure and in his hatred of the mediocrity of the world in book after book. French writer Emmanuel Carrère has immortalized him in an ambivalent biographical novel that could hardly be called anything other than Limonov.

This was the inspiration for recently exiled Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov's moving portrait. Like Carrère – who also plays a small role in the film – what captivated the director was Limonov's Dostoievskian "russitude." His burning faith in creation, his inclination to rebellion, his hatred of self-righteousness, his inner chaos, his nihilism, his taste for provocation and imprecation and his readiness for both ignominy and destruction. To evoke Limonov in the light of this book is to confess to being less interested in the biography itself of a character who is in any case elusive; than in the fascination that this being of refusal and scandal, not devoid of literary talent, arouses.

Hence the striking and diffracted portrait – plastically hemmed in, slapped in off by the anathemas spat in the face of the world by his hero in his books – offered by this great stylist (see Leto, 2018; Petrov Fever, 2021; Tchaikovsky's Wife, 2022) that Serebrennikov preserved against all odds. Portrait of a dandy punk madly in love with a model of hieratic beauty, Elena, who ended up sacrificing him for her career. He dragged his rage and fever from the New York underworld, where he lived penniless for a while, making love to tramps; to Parisian intellectual circles, where he became a prototype of the alliance of communism and fascism.

He eventually threw himself into the political arena, founding the ultranationalist National-Bolshevik Party in 1993 with the philosopher Alexandre Douguine, in his homeland, where Vladimir Putin, who was about to join him in his extremism, imprisoned him in 2007. In this respect, Limonov crystallized, in a truly visionary sense, an intoxication with power and violence that the current imperial and warmongering drift of Russian power is fulfilling.

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