Limonov: The Ballad

Eduard Limonov is one of the odder Russian literary figures. You may not have heard of him but he certainly wanted you to. Thanks to Kirill Serebrennikov’s film, Cannes now has.

Growing up in a Russian family in Kharkiv, then part of the Soviet Union and now in Eastern Ukraine, Eduard Veniaminovich (Ben Whishaw) – as he was known at the time – is an aspiring poet who wants more than the grim drudgery of Soviet life. Yet, as an opening flash-forward reveals, he is not an anti-Soviet dissident. A running joke throughout the film is his disdainful opinion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the renowned anti-Soviet Russian writer. Instead, he is portrayed as a hedonist who believes in his own unrecognised genius

This inevitably falls foul of the authorities and he and his “wife” Elena (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) are exiled to 1970s New York, where they indulge in the delights of the city’s growing scuzzy, sexualised punk scene. Still, it is not until much later that Limonov finds the literary fame he is looking for as his autobiographical novel is rejected by publishers. Those who are aware of the real-life story will know that his journey eventually ended with him returning to post-Soviet Russia and founding a nationalist Bolshevik party that pined for the certainties of the communist system. 

Whishaw is fantastic as Limonov, playing him impeccably as a vaguely effeminate but violent libertine and an older, rigid public intellectual. Yet there is a problem at the heart of the film, and that is that its subject is a very unlikeable and unsympathetic figure. Childishness combined with a desire for revolutionary violence is not a compelling combination, for very good reason. A moment of domestic abuse consolidates this.

The world is also full of Limonovs – frustrated poets bitter at the fact the world doesn’t recognise them as great figures. As is Russian literature, known for characters like the disastrously radical and misanthropic student Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment.

That’s not to say Limonov is not a fascinating figure with a life worth exploring. His shift from radical left-wing nihilism to Russian nationalism is extremely relevant at a time when various shades of extremism are on the rise.

But we need one that is less willing to take his own self-mythologising quite so much at face value and perhaps looks more into whether a primary motivation might be narcissism rather than heroism. One that sees him more as a much more dangerous version of Rik from The Young Ones combined with Raskolnikov than any kind of hero.

Mark Worgan

Limonov: The Ballad does not have a UK release date yet.

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