Limonov, the protagonist of Emmanuel Carrère’s strange book, is actually quite worth discussing. And so is Carrère’s attitude to him.

Limonov was born in my native city of Kharkiv, and in 1974 he somehow managed to emigrate to the US. I have no idea how he managed to do it unless he worked for the KGB and was sent to New York with the task of spying on the Soviet dissidents there. Limonov’s father was a low-level NKVD officer, so it’s not that out there. Nobody knows for sure how he managed to leave, though, and I’m as clueless as anybody on this account.

When Limonov got to New York, he experienced what every Soviet person did when encountering capitalism: shock and disappointment. What made him different is that he spoke about it openly. The other emigrés immediately hated Limonov for saying what they could never dare, which was that they were sorry they’d emigrated.

What shocked Limonov was that in a capitalist country you have to work very hard to have a regular, middle-class lifestyle. Not fabulous riches, not your own island with a castle and a private airplane but just a normal life. Limonov perceived the suggestion that he had to work his tail off with no expectation of owning a castle as an insult.

This absolute outrage at what life in a capitalist society was really like informed Limonov’s writing and politics for the rest of his life.

The funny thing is that Limonov did achieve success in the West. His books were all published and got translated into different languages. He had fans, interviews, and a following. But a writer in the West doesn’t make billions. (Unless she gets divorced from Jeff Bezos but that’s a different story). Success only made Limonov’s outrage grow. He was widely recognized as a talented writer but there was still nothing remotely resembling fabulous wealth coming his way.

He went back to the USSR, and when the USSR fell apart, he founded the National-Bolshevik party to bring the Soviet Union back. It was an openly fascist movement back in the time when the word “fascist” still meant something. It was also a very tiny movement. Limonov never had more than a handful of members in his party. Finally, Putin – who back then was pro-democracy, pro-West, and George W Bush’s best friend – got fed up and sent Limonov and all his party members to a prison camp.

Nobody ever took Limonov seriously because his dreams of Russia going to war against the West and the restoration of the USSR sounded nuts. But it turns out that his true following in Russia was bigger than anybody could imagine. That following rose, swept up the miserable weakling Putin, and is now doing everything Limonov ever dreamt of.

Carrère turns himself inside out trying to explain every war crime Limonov participated in (yes, real war crimes) and every expression of love for Hitler as something he couldn’t have possibly meant. “When he fired into a crowd during the war in Serbia, I’m sure he fired over the civilians’ heads. He’s a gentle soul, he didn’t mean any harm.”

These “gentle souls” are raping toddlers in Ukraine but there’s still a crowd of these officious Western intellectuals who are eager to explain how they don’t really mean it.

It is now the official position of my university that a student can only fail calculus or chemistry if the professor is consciously trying to keep that student out of the discipline for racist, sexist or classist reasons.

There are administrative measures being taken against these professors.

Has anybody heard about this on the news? It’s happening everywhere. It’s now unacceptable to say that some students are unable to pass calculus. No, it’s got to be the fault of the evil professors. We have accepted very easily that our colleagues in sciences are capable of something as psychotic as purposefully failing good students out of sheer nastiness.

Many professors will now give a passing grade to everybody just to avoid being called names and shamed in public. What this will do to the sciences can be imagined.

And I’m supposed to care about some mega snowflake in Florida feeling “unsafe”? Wake up, people. Academic freedom died a long time ago, and it wasn’t Ron DeSantis who killed it. We did it ourselves.

It’s beyond funny that people at some college in Florida are pouting that they’ll have to remove words like “whiteness” and “social justice” from their college syllabi. “Oppression! Censorship!” they shriek.

I’m still unable to name my course “Introduction to Hispanic Civilization.” I’ve been fighting for years but, apparently, the word “civilization” is offensive and so is “Hispanic.” There’s no field of activity in the US that’s more censored, controlled and ideologically manipulated than higher education. It’s always censored by the left, though, so it’s OK. And now, all of a sudden, the shoe is on the other foot, and the squealing is deafening.

My daughter goes to a Christian school but it so happened that the first-grade teacher retired. The school had to hire somebody out of the public school system, and this is already the second time that I catch her at channeling the race-obsessed woke worldview. I’m sure she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. This propaganda gradually molds you until you lose the capacity to see it from the outside and notice how strange and contradictory it is.

I shudder to think what I’d be hearing from my kid if she were at a public school.

In a class on MLK, my daughter was told that “he was killed by a white person.” My hair stood on end when I heard this.

“He was killed by a bad person,” I had to explain. “A murderer, a very bad individual.”

The next thing we are going to hear is that Ukraine was invaded by white people.

I can’t tell you what it feels like to go on the website of my Ukrainian school for the Saturday morning lecture and see an announcement saying, “Due to a massive air strike on Ukraine, the class will be delayed by an hour. Please proceed to the nearest bomb shelter.”

I’m going to write about the book Limonov by the French writer Emmanuel Carrère as a work of literature. I’ll write about Limonov as a person and political activist in a later post because it’s an important topic that’s different from what I want to say about the book.

I never read Carrère before, so I don’t know what he usually does but Limonov belongs to one of the strangest genres I ever encountered. The book is about the life of the Ukrainian writer and the founder of the Russian National-Bolshevik party Eduard Limonov. But instead of actually writing about Limonov, Carrère retells Limonov’s autobiographical novels as if they were statements of fact or compendia of documentary evidence.

It’s the strangest thing. Carrère seems unaware that literature exists. He takes everything that Limonov’s first-person narrators say completely at face value and painstakingly retells their words in the third person. The truly bizarre part is that all of Limonov’s books that Carrère retells have been translated. And French was actually the first language they were translated to. They sold very well, too. So it’s not like Carrère’s readers lack opportunities to read the actual novels Carrère so unnecessarily rewrites.

Another issue with this exercise in retelling is that Limonov is way more talented as a writer than Carrère. It got really funny when all of a sudden I came across a strikingly well-written page in Carrère’s book. “Wow,” I thought, “if Carrère knows how to do this, then why is the rest of the book so inferior in comparison?” And then I realized that Carrère was simply providing a long direct quote from a novel by Limonov. I was reading on Kindle, and the opening quotation mark got lost. Reading Carrère’s plodding retelling of Limonov’s novels reminded me of the old joke where a guy decides that Pavarotti is a terrible singer because his friend Rabinovich sang him a couple of arias and they sounded like crap. Sadly, Carrère seems to have no idea that he’s playing the role of Rabinovich. But hey, how convenient. What a great shortcut for a biographer. There’s no longer any need to investigate, sift through records, interview people, rummage around archives. Simply retell a couple of first-person novels, and that’s all.

It gets even more disturbing, though. As background to Limonov’s life, Carrère tries to explain the late and post-Soviet history and does it with the same uninformed aplomb as when he undertakes to copy a more talented author. He avoids researching his topic and instead narrates a highly tendentious and controversial version of events as if it was THE TRUTH. It’s clear that he heard or read it somewhere and is now doing his favorite thing: retelling.

What’s really weird is Carrère’s almost deathly lack of curiosity towards the people and the events he writes about. You’d think that at some point he’d get over what is clearly an extreme case of congenital laziness and try to explore the subject he writes about a bit. That never happens, though. He plods along, stripping every vestige of the literary from Limonov’s novels and turning them into stenographic accounts. Then he randomly stops. And the book ends.

A Russian dissident journalist said yesterday that the moronic Russia collusion greatly emboldened Putin. He heard Americans repeat, time and again, that he was so immensely powerful that he actually managed to steal an American election. This made him feel really important and almost omnipotent.

Putin is obsessed with America. To him, having an impact in the country of his deep fixation is everything. If he could actually bring the US to its knees and subvert its vaunted democracy – and he must have done so if Americans themselves said it – then clearly he could crush a small, insignificant Ukraine. He’s not a smart guy and doesn’t understand that America likes to role-play at weakness precisely because it’s so strong. Russia collusion was a game devised for purely internal purposes. Nobody believed it and it meant absolutely nothing. It’s impossible to understand the coy playfulness of strength if you are not yourself strong.

So the famous chat bot is woke? People say it’s even worse on “white privilege” and that kind of stuff.

This is from social media. I didn’t try it myself because it’s super creepy. Wants my phone number and probably a urine sample for the privilege of spying on me.

See? It helps to have friends who work for Big Pharma. My friend told me back in the Fall of 2020 that Novavax was the only one likely to work.

The friend is unvaccinated, obviously.