Eduard and Natalia in Paris, 1989.
In our last episode Evgenia and I talked about the sad state of Soviet immigrant literature produced today. In this episode we look on the bright side: we talk to French cult author Thierry Marignac about the bigger-than-life lives of his friends Eduard Limonov and Natalia Medvedeva, who — among other things — together produced the best literature of the third wave of Soviet immigration.
Eduard — a novelist and the infamous founder of the avant-garde National-Bolshevik Party — passed away earlier this year. Natalia died in 2003. A singer and a model who was married for a long time to Eduard Limonov when they lived in Paris, she is not well known as an author — but her novel and her short stories about her immigrant experience and her short modeling career in 1970s Los Angeles (she was on the first album of the Cars) are incredibly funny and dark. I think she wrote the best Soviet immigrant lit there is. Sadly none of it translated into English so we can’t share it with you.
—Yasha Levine
Thierry and his girlfriend in Paris, 1985.
