Russian writer and activist Edouard Limonov is dead

Text by: RFI Follow

Made famous in France thanks to the eponymous story by Emmanuel Carrère, the writer and militant Russian nationalist Edouard Limonov died on Tuesday March 17 in Moscow at the age of 78. With him disappeared a certain radical way of looking at politics and the fight against Western hegemony.

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With our correspondent in Moscow, Jean-Didier Revoin

The Russian poet prefers the big negroes , the title of his first novel which traces his life of penniless dissident and dependent on social assistance in the bottom of New York in the mid-1970s sets the tone.

Edouard Veniaminovitch Savenko had chosen Edouard Limonov in allusion to the spiciness of the lemon (lemon in Russian) or to the explosion of a pomegranate ( limonka in slang). The writer has always rejected the bourgeois model. A refugee in France, his punk articles will be published by Idiot International, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the writer will return to Russia.

A fierce opponent of the liberals and of everything that contributes to the gentrification of Russian society, he founded the national Bolshevik party in 1993. In 2001, he would go to prison for 4 years for illegal possession of weapons.

►Also listen: Bonjour l'Europe - The Renaudot Prize: “Edward Limonov” by Emmanuel Carrère

After the ban of his party in 2007, he will create in 2010 the Other Russia , a party which wants to be an answer to that of Vladimir Poutine, United Russia. Marginalized on the political level since, he bequeaths us an iconoclastic and punk work of fifty works.

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