From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Cocain Romance
Cocain Romance
Cocain Romance Today, Novel With Cocaine counts John Updike and Will
Self among its admirers and is said to have laid the path
Author(s) M. Ageyev for William S. Burroughs to pen similar examinations of
Publication date 1934 junky excess.
The Cocain Romance or Novel With Cocaine (Roman s kokain-
Romance,
om), is a mysterious Russian novel first published in 1934
Quotes
in a Parisian émigré publication, Numbers, and subtitled "Early one morning I, Vadim Maslennikov, set off for
"Confessions of a Russian opium-eater". Its author was school (I was going on seventeen at the time) having for-
given as M. Ageyev. The English translation of the title gotten the envelope with the first-semester fees Mother
fails to convey the double entendre of the Russian had left me in the dining room the day before."
"Роман," meaning both "novel" and "romance." "Before I came in contact with cocaine I assumed that
The Cocain Romance is said to be a Dostoevskyan psy- happiness was an entity, while in fact all human happi-
chological novel of ideas, which explores the interaction ness consists of a clever fusion of two elements: (1) the
between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its physical feeling of happiness, and (2) the external event
frank portrayal of an adolescent’s cocaine addiction. The providing the psychic impetus for that feeling."
story relates the formative experiences of narrator "I would stroll down the boulevards and try to catch
Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug the eye of every passing woman. I never, as the saying
abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives goes, ’undressed them’ with my glance, nor did I feel
rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to any carnal desire for them. In that feverish state, which
the Russian Revolution of 1917, the novel’s obsession might have inspired another, say to write poetry, I would
with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the simply stare into the eyes of all women walking in the
historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of other direction and wait for a similarly terrifying, wide-
humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic eyed look in response. I never accosted a woman who re-
transgressions committed in its name." sponded with a smile, because I knew that anyone who
Following its original publication in Numbers, the smiled at a look like mine could only be a prostitute or a
novel was published in book form; it was scorned as deca- virgin."
dent and disgusting, to use the term applied to it by "To a man in-love, all women are merely women ex-
Vladimir Nabokov. In 1983 the novel was translated into cept the woman he loves, who thereby becomes a human;
French and published to nearly unanimous praise; an to a woman in love, all men are merely humans except
English translation (by Michael Henry Heim) was pub- the man she loves, who thereby becomes a man."
lished in 1984. After the French translation was pub-
lished, there was some brief speculation in literary cir-
cles as to whether Novel with Cocaine might actually be the
External links
work of Nabokov, perhaps one of his mystifications; the • Review of Novel With Cocaine
consensus is that Nabokov was not the author. Nabokov’s
son Dmitri addresses this issue in an afterword to his
1986 English translation of VN’s novel The Enchanter.
The real author of the book is Mark Levi, a mysterious
Russian émigré who sent in a manuscript to the Parisian
journal from Istanbul in 1934. Mark Levi returned to the
Soviet Union during WWII and spent the rest of his life in
Yerevan, where he died on August 5, 1973.
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Categories:
• Russian novels
• 1934 novels
• Cocaine
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Cocain Romance
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