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Title: Memoir of a Russian Punk by Edward Limonov, Eduard Limonov ISBN: 0-8021-1026-6 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: November, 1990 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Soviet Union the west never knew existed
Comment: During the Cold War, everyone in the West, or at least most everyone, was led to believe that all of the millions of citizens in the Soviet Union were obedient workers and loyal to the principals and dogma of the Communist party. RUSSIAN PUNK is a delight in that it shows the seedy, off-beat side of Soviet life that Soviet leaders either didn't know or didn't want to know about and certainly didn't want to reveal to the West.The central character is Eddie-baby. As a teenager growing up in the seemingly invincible Communist sphere of 1950's Soviet Union, he has two options for his life. The first is to become a respectable, hard-working citizen and member of the Party. The second is to become a hood. In the rapidly maturing Eddie, the life of a hood holds far more appeal than the life of a member of the goat herd, his scathing term for the respectable working class.Trapped within the working-class district of Saltovka in Kharkov, a city in the Ukraine, Eddie-baby pursues the life of a hood with the slackers, derelicts, thieves, and murderers of the town. To him it's all a lark: When he and friends aren't getting into mischief, they're greasing back their hair and singing Elvis Presley songs. All these street punks are to him much more stimulating than the respectable working-class citizens of Saltovka. Though Eddie-baby is a very gifted poet and can climb higher than the riffraff with whom he associates, he nevertheless remains enmeshed in their dark world.He has an epiphany of sorts toward the end of the book after assuming a role in a violent street crime, and we all cheer for him as he as last finds the fortitude to move on and reach higher.This is a side of Soviet life you probably never knew existed, and Eddie-baby's story vibrantly displays it.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Masterpiece
Comment: This is an account of Limonov's adolescence in Kharkov, a provincial Soviet city, in the years after Stalin's death. But Limonov's hero Eddie-Baby is nothing at all like the Russian heroes English-speaking readers have come to expect and his Kharkov is nothing at all like the tightly-policed USSR we usually encounte in emigre novels. In Eddie Baby's Kharkov, there is no law. Police are goons, and the quickest way to become a legend in the housing projects of Saltovka is to beat up a cop. Eddie-Baby is a nearsighted brain who decides, at the age of eleven, to become a hooligan--and does so with the same quiet, scary determination which once led him to fill notebooks with data on the fauna of the tropics. He devotes himself to learning the rules of his punk/proletarian world with a slightly crazed pedantry, and takes the reader along with him through one holiday weekend in this astounding, completely unknown habitat: the steel jungles of the Soviet nine-floor housing projects.
But the book is by no means gritty or grimy, or any of those silly words reviewers use to describe urban descriptions. In Eddie-Baby's mind, his world is a forest, full of ogres and prey--and all of it is worthy of caressing, precise description. He makes you love this world. There are paragraphs in this book I've read something like ten thousand times, they are so perfect. A middleaged lecher pouring a glass of vodka; a gang beating a pedestrian to death; a precise account of the sort of glue and paper you need to break a window quietly for a burglary; Limonov invests every one of these moments from a vanished, outlandish world with a calm and uncanny beauty. Get this book at any cost. There is nothing like it in the world.
Rating: 5
Summary: "Rebel w/o a Cause" meets Iceberg Slim, Russian style
Comment: This is a classic piece of Russian fiction that shows a darker side of Kruschev's Russia than is generally available. This is a definitive timepiece; what's most striking in it's depiction of Russian life are the parrallels with society in modern America.
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Title: The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia by Mark Ames, Matt Taibbi, Edward Limonov ISBN: 0802136524 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: His Butler's Story by Edward Limonov, Judson Rosengrant ISBN: 0394556070 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: June, 1987 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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