Whither the Romantics?
On the Death of Individualism in the Modern World
Eduard Limonov died on March 17th, 2020, at age 77. For a larger-than-life exhibitionist, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Coming just six days after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Limonov’s death was completely eclipsed by the global response to the novel respiratory virus. The low-key, banal cause of his death (surgery-related complications) could not have been much to his liking either; Limonov had often said he wanted to go in a violent way. Yet just as the WHO announcement marked the dawn of a strange new era, Limonov’s passing symbolized the end of an old one. There is a connection between the two events, but to understand it, we first need to get the introductions out of the way.
Unless you’re in Russia or have read the autobiographical novel It’s Me, Eddie, Limonov’s is probably one of the most interesting lives you’ve never heard about. He packed a lot into those 77 years. Leaving his provincial hometown behind him, Limonov wrote poems in Moscow, drifted through abject poverty in the streets of New York, wrote a book that would go on to become a modern classic, hobnobbed with déclassé intellectuals and fringe activists as a man of letters in Paris, dabbled in internecine conflicts in the Balkans, founded a radical political party back in Russia, and eventually did a stint in prison for his alleged role in a coup attempt in Kazakhstan. At the time of his death, he’d racked up several marriages, all of them as successful as the coup.
Limonov’s journey is an exhilarating cinematographic experience, and while I am not aware of any movies about the man, his life inspired at least two biographies (one of them, a fictionalized account, was written by a French writer — see the image accompanying this piece). Limonov was without a doubt a genius, but not in any of the spheres he tried to master. Pace his own aggrandizing opinions of himself, he was not a great writer. With its descriptions of gay interracial sex, It’s Me, Eddie, Limonov’s most famous work, is unlikely to interest an Anglo reader, who had already been taken on a tour of the outhouse of the literary pantheon by works such as Naked Lunch when It’s Me, Eddie was published. Limonov’s novel was a literary sensation in Russia at least in part because of its novelty — the Russian canon had never encountered down-at-heel (anti-)heroes copulating with black hobos in foreign cities. The literary sensation was also a very regional one.
Limonov’s party, a hybrid between Bolshevism and imperial nationalism, never took off, and his dreams of becoming, if not the Russian president, then at least the country’s “ayatollah,” were destined to remain pipe dreams. His essays reveal a shrewd, prescient thinker with a fine nose for his times, but Limonov did not leave behind any school of thought and has no autonomous intellectual heritage of his own to speak of.
Limonov’s real genius was, quite simply, in being Limonov. The comparison may seem strange, but Limonov was not unlike Casanova. It’s the same species, really. Who remembers Casanova’s lottery system (still in use), his translation of the Iliad into Italian, or the assistance he rendered to Mozart and his librettist with work on an opera? Even his famous memoirs, I suspect, are too often read in an abridged version. Casanova was not a brilliant artist or mathematician, but he didn’t need to be one — the story of his life, with its vagabondism, love affairs, and high-wire prison escape, is far more fascinating than the pursuits of his mind. Like Limonov two centuries later, Casanova turned his life into a work of art. His real masterpiece was his own biography.
Both Casanova and Limonov were romantics. Romanticism is a slippery term to define; Eric Hobsbawm did quite well by using a negative definition, focusing not on what romanticism was for, but what it was against — the middle. For Hobsbawm, the Romantic movement was above all “an extremist creed” (see The Age of Revolution). Hobsbawm employed the definition in the context of the arts, but art and real life are intertwined. When you seek to make a work of art out of your life, you have to be something of an extremist.
Romantics are not always easy to get along with. Going to extremes is hardly conducive to being a productive member of society. Romantics tend to reject whichever system they are in, since systems — all systems — tend to narrow the wingspan of individuals and whittle down their scope of action. Systems are interested in the average, not in outliers. Limonov rejected the oppressive dreariness of the Soviet regime, the dog-eat-dog market model of the US, the shambolic post-Soviet Russia of Yeltsin, and the stabilizing “authoritarian-lite” presidency of Putin (though he softened towards Putin after the annexation of Crimea). In truth, Limonov would have rejected anything he’d previously espoused, had one of his visions become reality. He would have rejected paradise itself; acceptance of the status quo is tantamount to settling in the middle, an inhospitable zone for anyone with a romantic personality. If life is to be epic, it has to be lived on the extremes, where one flirts with precarity, dramatic temperatures, and Thanatos. Romantics can be violent, as footage of Limonov firing a machine gun somewhere near Sarajevo makes clear (he claimed to have never shot at civilians — one can only hope). At their worst, you get men like Hitler, whose “all or nothing” approach to life made him a romantic, albeit one who could only act out his romantic impulses through destruction and mass atrocities.
Yet romanticism is not inherently disruptive. Romantics don’t necessarily roam the world looking to start fires. In one way at least, they have a positive function: romantics raise the watermark of our humanness. Living one’s life as if it were a work of art explores the boundaries of human experience and forces one to “live existentially,” as Norman Mailer (another romantic) put it. Romantics are forever at war with tedium and predictability. They are the antithesis of bureaucracy, institutionalization, and all other social straitjackets that constrain one’s individuality and turn him into a number. In a word, romanticism is the highest expression of individualism.
Outside of art, romantics are bound to run into limitations. While art offers an inexhaustible number of possibilities, real life comes with a more modest menu. Casanova seems to have had more possibilities available to him in the rococo decadence of the 18th century than Limonov had in the 20th, but everyone gets old eventually. An aging romantic is bound to feel out of his element; Limonov, with his leather jackets and revolutionary harangues on LiveJournal, looked like he was positively adrift towards the end of his life. He faded into the sunset as best as he could — one-third literary figure, one-third pundit, and one-third prophet — but the trick is to leave the stage before the curtain comes down. Limonov had exhausted the possibilities offered by real life and was no longer sure what to do with himself. Still, he had put on a pretty good show.
He would be unlikely to fare equally well today. Individualism has been in retreat for a while and now seems like it is on life support. While our standards of living are high, the scope of action available to individuals is shrinking. Amid the increasing virtualization of life, the scope is for many reduced to the size of their computer screens. If the world is more connected than ever, it is also vastly more uniform. “Same-y,” as Merissa in one of Updike’s Henry Bech novels would say. Breathtakingly invasive, modern technology draws people away from the rawness of real life to tether them to a world of make-believe, fake identities, and vapid fata morganas. It is a world where the individual is reduced to being a mere user, a world that turns people into a teeming globo mass. Virtual life spills over into real life and shapes it; humans morph into humanoid emojis that dress alike, talk alike, and think alike. Technology, despite the myriad advantages it confers, is the ultimate force of dehumanization; the construction of the “global village” is carried out on the burial site of the individual.
The response to the pandemic has taken the dehumanization of society and the effacement of individuality to a whole new level. People were forced to remain home and virtualize their relationships; they could not travel anywhere, except to the grocery store. Once released from their confinement by the overlords, they were told to “social distance.” Worse, they were ordered to wear masks, rendering themselves faceless. The philosopher Berdyaev wrote that through the human face we interpret not one’s physical life, but one’s spiritual life (see Slavery and Freedom). Our spiritual life is what separates us from animals and makes us individuals, and it is our spiritual life that has suffered a frontal attack by the pandemic measures. Along with masks, people are now required to present evidence of their “physical purity” with a QR code when entering many places. This growing digitalization of one’s human identity annihilates both the human and his identity, leaving only the physical body and reducing man to just another animal. The fusion of man and technology that forms the wet dreams of transhumanist utopians will spell out the end of individualism as such.
Therein lies the connection between Limonov’s death and the advent of the so-called “new normal,” if only at the metaphysical level. Limonov would be asphyxiated by our dystopian, profoundly anti-individualistic world hostile to notions of humanness, let alone romanticism. I struggle to picture Limonov’s face, with its oversized specs and signature goatee à la Trotsky, covered by a surgical mask. The man left a world that had ever less space for him, and his timing, despite first impressions, was fortuitous.
It might not be all gloom and doom. The fault line in the Covid crisis is between those who are comfortable living in the new dehumanized world and those who are not. Much of the debate has taken place in the virtual universe — that is, in the very place that further dehumanizes all of its inhabitants, including, paradoxically, people opposed to dehumanization. Against this backdrop, Canada’s Freedom Convoy, though a collective action, has been a heartening sign of humanness, and therefore, of individualism. Watching some of the images from Ottawa, I thought that if we can’t save the romantics, there is a chance we can at least preserve the human face.
For what it’s worth, Limonov anticipated the current moment. One of his many talents was a knack for determining the direction of the winds of history. He realized that the world to come would transcend the old political reality and make short work of the traditional political spectrum, which he considered a useless heirloom of the French Revolution. In a 2019 interview with El País, he said that the fight was now “between the people and the elites,” a state of affairs presently symbolized by the truckers honking at the establishment in Ottawa. There is, of course, no question whose side Limonov would take if he were alive.
