The cheapest food, not always enough of it; dirty little rooms, wretched poor clothes, cold, vodka, nerves – my second wife went out of her mind. Ten years of that life in Russia, and now the whole thing over again. "Where's your motherfucking justice, world?" I feel like asking. I worked ten years there, day after day, wrote so many collections of poetry, so many poems and stories, I accomplished a lot, I was able to create in my books a well-defined image of the Russian man. And the Russian people read me, they bought the eight thousand collections that I typed and distributed all those years, they knew them, recited them by heart.
But I saw one day that I would rise no higher there. Moscow was reading me, Leningrad was reading me, and my collections had found their way to a dozen other major cities, people accepted me, but the state did not. Try as I might with my primitive distribution methods, what I did would never reach the masses. My heart was bitter that for someone like Rozhdestvensky they ran off millions of copies, but they had not printed a single poem of mine. You can go fuck yourselves, I thought, you and your system. I haven't worked for you since I quit peddling books in 1964. I'll get the hell out of here with my beloved wife, I'll go to the other world. Writers breathe freer there, they say.
And so I came here. Now I see it makes no fucking difference, here or there. The same gangs in either sphere. But here I have something more to lose, because I am a Russian writer, I write in Russian words. And as a man, I found I had been spoiled by the praise of the underground, the attention of underground Moscow, of artistic Russia, where a poet is not what a poet is in New York. From time immemorial a poet in Russia has always been something of a spiritual leader. To make the acquaintance of a poet, for example, is a great honor there. Here a poet is shit, which is why even Joseph Brodsky is miserable here in your country. Once when he came to see me on Lexington Avenue he said, as he drank his vodka, "One has to have the hide of an elephant here in this country. I do, but you don't." There was anguish in these words, because Joseph Brodsky has succumbed to the system of this world, though he had not succumbed to the system of the other. I understood his misery. In Leningrad, after all, apart from his troubles, he had had tens of thousands of admirers, he would have been received with delight in any house on any evening, the beautiful Russian maidens, the Natashas and Tanyas, were all his – because he, a red-haired Jewish youth, was a Russian poet. The best place for a poet is Russia. There, even the authorities fear our kind. They have from time immemorial.
And other friends of mine, those who went to Israel, what nationalists they were! They emigrated expecting to find in Israel an application for their minds, talents, ideas; they believed it was their state. Like hell! It is not their state. Israel does not need their ideas, their talent, their ability to think, not at all. Israel needs soldiers, just like the USSR – hup, two, and obey! You're a Jew, you must defend your country. But we're sick of defending your faded old banners, your values, which long ago ceased to be values; sick of defending what's "yours." We're tired of "yours," old men, we ourselves will soon be old men, we doubt that we should, that we must. You can all go fuck yourselves…
"We." Although I think of myself as separate, I keep returning to this concept "we." By now there are a great many of us here. And I must confess, we have among us quite a few madmen. This is normal.
There's a certain Lenya Chaplin who constantly makes the rounds of the emigres. Properly he is not a Chaplin, he has a complicated Jewish surname, but back in Moscow he was in love with Chaplin's younger daughter in absentia and took himself a pseudonym in her honor. When said daughter got married, Lenya mourned, he tried to poison himself. I knew him in Moscow and once attended a birthday party of his where, besides me, there was only one other man, the seminormal philosopher Bondarenko, the ideologue of Russian fascism, stock boy in a liquor store. I was astounded by Lenya's narrow streetcar of a room. All its walls were papered over with the great men of our world, large and small, in several layers. There were Oswald and Kennedy, Mao and Nixon, Che Guevara and Hitler… Never have I seen a crazier room. Only the ceiling was free of great men. Some great heads were glued on top of others, the paper was layered as thick as my finger.
Now, after spending time in various American states – and, as evil tongues say, in several state mental hospitals – Lenya lives in New York on welfare. He makes peculiar use of public assistance. He sets aside the whole sum, about $250. He plans to travel in the future, or maybe join the American army. He spends the night with friends and eats… what he takes from garbage cans on the street, first a slice of pizza, then some other filth. So doing, he invariably makes one and the same pronouncement: "Grain by grain, and the hen fills her belly."
This madman Lenya – who is nevertheless a cultured youth, he's read Nietzsche, and written some Buddhist parables about three elephants – is a relative of sorts. My second wife, Anna Rubinstein, had a niece who was Lenya's first woman. Lecherous Stella, who, in the expression of a longtime acquaintance of mine, had a cunt like Finland Station, fucked the tall schizoid Lenya. My "relative" also lived in Israel for a while, before America.
Lenya is always sitting at somebody else's, chewing something. Sometimes he drops in on my neighbor Edik Brutt.
"Motherfucker," I say to him, "what are you doing, spreading rumors again? Always hanging around, you shitass! You ought to stay home, you big slob, write something, work," I say.
"How vulgar you've become, Limonov," says Lenya. Bearded, baldpated, dressed in torn jeans, he is a little afraid of me. Even the shape of his head and the stoop of his tall figure testify that he has been mad since birth. I see no special sin or misfortune in this, I merely enjoy establishing the fact.
A completely different form of madness has taken hold in little Sasha Zelensky. This mustachioed prig is notorious among us for owing a gigantic amount in debts, for an emigre. He works nowhere, receives no public assistance, and lives exclusively on credit. On the wall of his studio, which he rents on none other than Fifty-eighth Street, for $300 a month, is emblazoned the proud inscription: "World – I owe you money!"
Zelensky graduated from the Institute of International Relations in Moscow. His papa was a big wheel at Krokodil. When he first arrived in America Sasha worked as an economist in marine transportation; this was his profession, and since he knew English, they took him in his specialty. He made quite a decent salary, but naturally his madness stirred within him and demanded sacrifices, an incarnation. Sasha decided that he was a great photographer, although he had never taken pictures in the USSR. An emaciated man who looks like a cross between two Russian writers, Belinsky and Gogol, Sasha chose photography, I think, in the belief that there was easy money in this "chic" profession. Had he decided he was a photographer and then taken pictures, labored, striven, sought, that would have been all right; it would simply have been called fanaticism. But this is serious: he takes no pictures, knows how to do nothing, and has developed a frenetic business borrowing more and more money. New loans crawl over old… It's the only thing he knows how to do. How does he manage? I don't know. Maybe he puts on a yarmulke and goes to the synagogue. That's what many do…
How much does he owe? I don't know. Perhaps twenty thousand. He calls up people he has seen once in his life and asks for money, and is very offended when they refuse him. It has been a colossally long time since he paid for his studio, I don't know why they haven't thrown him out by now. He lives on bread and water, thin as a skeleton, but for some reason he doesn't go to work. At one time he worked as a waiter at a coffee shop on Forty-third Street, but after a short time they threw him out.