Emmanuel Carrère, Limonov

Our Reading Journey

During our session on Limonov, we followed Carrère into the loyalty he cannot quite justify toward a man to whom history keeps returning at the worst moments. Eduard Limonov grows up in Kharkiv, the son of an NKVD officer, and by the time the book catches up with him, he has been homeless in New York, a billionaire's butler, a minor literary star in Paris, and a soldier fighting alongside Serbian forces in the Balkans. He later founds the National Bolshevik Party with Alexander Dugin and spends four years in prison after an attempted coup. We spent much of the discussion on Carrère's refusal to settle him as either a hero or a villain.

What interested us more was Carrère's own position in the book: his admission that he needs Limonov, that this man supplies an intensity his biography lacks. We talked about Theodor Adorno's authoritarian personality and how well it fits Limonov's mix of submission and violence, and about spirituality stripped of belief, a hunger for a life dangerous enough to mean something. Limonov, published by P.O.L. in 2011, won the Prix Renaudot that same year.

About the Author

Emmanuel Carrère (born in 1957) grew up in Paris in a family shaped by his mother, the historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, and began his career as a film critic for Télérama and Positif before turning to fiction and nonfiction. His books move between journalism, biography, and memoir, often placing his doubts inside the story he is telling. Limonov, published in 2011 and translated into English in 2014, won the Prix Renaudot the year it came out.