Eduard Limonov is an extremist writer whose satire borders on vituperation. His pseudo-autobiographical It's Me, Eddie aroused a storm of controversy that has not been entirely quelled after more than a decade. Critical discourse on Limonov's work tends to superlatives and hyperbole. It's Me, Eddie has been lauded as “the quintessential novel of the third wave emigration” and reviled as pornographic slander. However one regards the subject matter and the tone of the book, it is an ingenious adaptation of the autobiographical novel to the satirical impulse.

Born auspiciously on Soviet Army Day, 1943 in Derzhinsk, Eduard Savenko was named after the poet Eduard Bagritskii. The son of a career NKVD officer and an educated homemaker, he grew up in the Ukrainian industrial city of Kharkov. According to his own account, he became a petty criminal at the age of sixteen. His experiences as a thief and adolescent hooligan constitute the basis of his Kharkov cycle of autobiographical works, including Memoirs of a Russian Punk and Young Rascal. He began writing what he has called “very bad” poetry at thirteen and as a young man moved in the bohemian literary circles of Kharkov.