(continued)

As we stand in the kitchen and wait for his bodyguards to arrive, Limonov runs through the day's itinerary: He, Kasparov, and their respective entourages are supposed to convene at Mayakovsky Square and then caravan to Sheremetyevo airport to fly to St. Petersburg. The two opposition leaders always try to travel together to rallies so that one or the other isn't individually detained—appearing in tandem at Other Russia events is key to keeping the coalition energized and unified. Everywhere they go, they are trailed by intelligence agents, who no longer even bother to be discreet.

Limonov's last girlfriend was a feral teenage punk named Nastya. She was bald and uncontrollable and enjoyed vandalizing his apartment, which was a source of great amusement to himAt an opposition protest in the capital last spring, security forces managed to physically separate the two men, which created disarray among the protesters. In the melee, Kasparov was detained and thrown in jail while Limonov slipped away and did an end-run around the police with an all-night drive on back roads, arriving in St. Petersburg in time for the next rally, where he was then also detained. (Unexpectedly, though, having Limonov held in St. Petersburg and Kasparov in Moscow became a major publicity boon for Other Russia.)

"What do you think the authorities have planned for you today?" I ask him as he paces around his modest kitchen. The room is austere and clean, with simple Brezhnev-era furnishings and an old bathtub just a few feet from the stove. A wooden plank laid widthwise across it holds his soap, shampoo, and toothbrush. It seems to reflect not only Limonov's contempt for middle-class consumerism and clutter, but also his Spartan, disciplined mentality, which has kept him focused on his impossible, lifelong dream: to lead a political revolution in Russia. Only a small-minded sucker would waste his money on some built-in IKEA kitchen—junk for "the goat herd," as Limonov calls the bourgeoisie in an early autobiographical novel, Memoir of a Russian Punk.

"I have no idea what will happen today," he replies. "Anyway, I don't give a shit. It's a waste of time trying to guess what the Kremlin has planned for us. We have to worry about our own plans for ourselves." The very notion that he should expend energy guessing what his Kremlin foes are thinking irritates Limonov on some basic level. It implies subservience. "They may do what they did a few weeks ago, this 'soft authoritarianism' bullshit, and not let us go to Petersburg."

Three weeks earlier, Kasparov, Limonov, their aides, and about a dozen Western journalists, including myself, were detained at Sheremetyevo. We were supposed to fly to Samara for a protest rally, but the woman at the Aeroflot check-in desk claimed that everyone's tickets were possibly counterfeit, so we all had to stick around for questioning. Kasparov pounced on her, relentlessly dissecting her claim. A border guard relieved her, but the poor bastard quickly regretted it: Kasparov was immediately on him, too—something like that face-sucking creature in Alien. The chess champion scoffed, threw up his hands, and mocked the man. "You're not serious! You can't be! It's shameful, a parody, theater of the absurd! You're breaking the law! Do you realize that you, a law enforcement official, are breaking your own laws? It's just unbelievable!" Kasparov then turned to a captain in Russia's Ministry of the Interior who had joined the fray: "Bring my passport back to me. You have no right! Bring me my passport!"

Limonov, meanwhile, withdrew to the other side of the airport lobby with his bodyguards, where they squatted Central Asian style, looking around with bored and contemptuous expressions. The writer and his crew were dressed in black, while Kasparov wore dowdy blue jeans, a baseball cap, and a tan, Eddie Bauer–style windbreaker. He took a series of cell phone calls from the media and continued his arguments with the authorities, without missing a beat.

"You don't want to bitch everyone out, the way Garry is?" I asked, as Kasparov demanded to see the identification of one of the agents, and then let out a savage laugh.

"You know, I have 13 years' political experience," Limonov said, smiling. "I don't give a fuck about these schmucks. I don't get so excited about little things as I used to. I'll answer their questions, yes, yes, and then get the hell out of here. This isn't my style."

We were detained until the last plane for Samara took off, ensuring that Kasparov and Limonov would miss the protest rally. Putin was in Samara that day, hosting German chancellor Angela Merkel. It was supposed to be a routine photo op, but when news hit that the Other Russia leaders had been barred from coming, Merkel went about as ballistic as a dour middle-age German bureaucrat possibly can. At their joint news conference, she scolded Putin: "I can understand if you arrest people throwing stones or threatening the right of the state to enforce order ... But it is altogether a different thing if you hold people up on the way to a demonstration."

Putin didn't fancy being lectured and struck back with a list of countercomplaints, leading the BBC to conclude that Russian–EU relations had "reached a new low."

The discord was another publicity coup for the opposition. When we finally left the airport, a mob of mostly foreign reporters, television crews, and photographers swarmed Kasparov, while Limonov slipped away with his bodyguards. "Garry has the patience for their idiotic questions, which is good for me," he said, an inkling of a smile on his face. "Anyway, the Western journalists are mostly afraid of me."

Before his career in politics forced him to adopt disciplined habits, Limonov led a wild, decadent existence—much of which became the raw material for his early novels and poems. He hung out with rock icons like Marky Ramone and punk legend Richard Hell, and the last three of his four wives have been stars in their own right.

"I think this life he lives now, spending so much time locked inside his apartment or in meetings, causes Limonov some pain," says Thierry Marignac, a French author who was one of Limonov's closest friends while Limonov was living in exile in Paris in the '80s. "He was very social and he liked partying. He saw himself as a kind of Elvis Presley of poetry."

Limonov wrote the first sexually explicit, brutally amoral novels that the Russian language had ever seen. His debut effort, It's Me, Eddie—which has been compared to the work of Henry Miller by some critics—was banned by the Soviet government but has sold more than a million copies in Russia since it was published there. The book chronicled his breakup with his wife Elena, a fashion model who was also a flamboyant luminary in Moscow's beau monde. They moved to New York in 1975, where she ditched him for an Italian count. Limonov went on welfare, drank prodigiously, and—if his autobiographical novel is to be believed—had sex with anyone he could, sampling the gamut from beautiful young women to scabrous homeless guys. He poured his bitterness against Americans into the book: "I scorn you because you lead dull lives, sell yourselves into the slavery of work, because of your vulgar plaid pants, because you make money and have never seen the world. You're shit!" He also raged against the West's propaganda about its freedoms: "They've got no freedom here, just try to say anything bold at work ... You're out on your ear."

Limonov crawled out of obscurity after his novels became celebrated in France in the years that followed. Leveraging his return to fame, he married another larger-than-life Russian model, Natalya Medvedeva, a strikingly tall, sharp-boned woman built like a praying mantis. (If you've seen the cover of the first Cars album, then you've seen Natalya Medvedeva; she also posed for Playboy.) Together, they moved to Paris and had a famously cruel, public relationship, replete with affairs and scandal.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the couple moved home so Limonov could pursue his dream of getting involved in Russian politics. Limonov's vision for his life was something on the order of a modern Lord Byron: a writer who undertakes political projects so grand and strange that they would seem to have sprung from the pages of a novel (or an epic poem, in the case of  Byron, who led a rebel army and became a national hero in the Greek War of Independence). But Medvedeva's hard-partying lifestyle didn't jibe with his new ambitions, and they split up in 1994. She hooked up with a famous metal guitarist and later died of an apparent drug overdose, while Limonov began a series of affairs with ever-younger fans of his bad-boy politics and art.

The writer's youthful paramours in those years often shaved their heads as a show of loyalty to the dark prince of Russia's underground. Before he was jailed by Putin in 2001—convicted on a weapons charge related to a bizarre scheme to raise a private army and invade Kazakhstan—his last girlfriend had been a feral teenage punk named Nastya. She was bald and uncontrollable and enjoyed vandalizing his apartment, which was a source of great amusement to him. But after his release from prison in 2003 transformed Limonov into an opposition icon, he lost interest in adolescent lovers.

In 2006, at age 63, he married his fourth wife, Ekaterina Volkova, then a 31-year-old pinup model and Russian television star who bears a much-noted resemblance to Angelina Jolie. She shaved her head and bore him his first child—a son.

She is now pregnant again, a development that seems to have saved the couple's marriage. "I got sick of everything," Limonov tells me, recalling a recent fight with Volkova that ended with a short separation. "I threw my vodka glass at her, and it almost hit my mother-in-law in the head. Anyway, a couple of weeks later, I find out that she is pregnant with my second child, so that brought us back together again."