Novela con cocaína (Clásicos Modernos)

by M. Agueev, Víctor Gallego Ballestero (Translator)

«Para un hombre enamorado todas las mujeres son mujeres, a excepción de aquella a la que ama, a la que considera una persona. Para una mujer enamorada todos los hombres son personas, a excepción de aquel al que ama, al que considera un hombre.» Reflexiones como ésta, en una novela por lo demás repleta de infrecuentes revelaciones sobre sexualidad y roles de género, y de elementos ciertamente inéditos como la adicción a la cocaína, debieron llamar la atención, a comienzos de la década de 1930, del grupo de emigrados rusos que editaban en París la revista Cifras y a cuya redacción llegó, con el seudónimo de M. Aguéiev, el manuscrito de Novela con cocaína.

La paternidad de la novela, que llegó a ser atribuida a Nabókov y que no sería definitivamente esclarecida hasta 1994, fue desde entonces un enigma. Pero el revuelo estaba justificado por la extraordinaria originalidad de la obra, una narración en forma autobiográfica, ambientada en Moscú en vísperas de la Revolución, de un joven impelido por «el deseo de conferir a mi personalidad un carácter singular», desde sus últimos años en el Instituto hasta su reclusión en el solitario universo de «desdoblamientos» de la cocaína.

Osada, profunda e incómoda, con una visión del mundo que supone un insulto a nuestra noción más luminosa, tierna y pura, esto es, «el alma humana», ésta es una novela imprescindible del siglo XX, por primera vez presentada en traducción directa del ruso.

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Classics, Russian Literature, Literature, Novels, Drugs

172 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

M. Ageyev is believed to be the nom-de-plume of Mark Lazarevich Levi. His best-known work, Novel With Cocaine was published in 1934 in the Parisian émigré publication, Numbers. Nikita Struve has alleged it to be the work of another Russian author employing a pen name, Vladimir Nabokov; this idea was debunked by Nabokov's son Dmitry in his preface to The Enchanter.

Levi's life is shrouded in mystery and conjecture. He returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1942 and spent the rest of his life in Yerevan, where he died on August 5, 1973.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Russian title of the novel can also be translated to English as Romance with Cocaine and somehow this variant appeals to me more.
Novel with Cocaine is factually a diary of a cad:

…female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you’re hungry and disgust you when you’ve had your fill.

The protagonist goes the way his meanness and rascality make him go…

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.

For him who lives a low life there is no way but down.

[Glenn Russell]

I suspect there's good reason why little is known of Russian author Marc Levi who used M. Ageyev as a nom-de-plume - he wanted it that way. Novel with Cocaine (alternate title: A Romance with Cocaine), his one and only novel, was originally published in 1934, a tale about an alienated, insecure young man by the name of Vadim Maslennikov living in Moscow during the country's tumultuous early years of the 20th century.

The novel is comprised of four parts: the first two are Vadim's recounting his time at school and encounters with young women; in the third, Vadim tells of his turning to cocaine; the novel concludes with his subsequent philosophic reflections. For the purpose of my review, other than noting Vadim comes off as something of a nasty, spiteful Dostoyevsky underground man in his student days and his deliberately infecting an innocent girl with venereal disease, I will focus on Vadim and cocaine since I suspect this is the main reason readers are drawn to Novel with Cocaine in the first place. Additionally, I myself found the cocaine section by far the most compelling.

"Mike, Nelly and Zander return to the room. I open up my powder on the arm of the chair, ask Mike for the toothpick and snort in two more pinches. I do this, of course, not for myself, but for them. The paper crackles, the cocaine jumps at every crackle, but I accomplish everything and don't spill anything. The light, joyous sheen I feel at this I take to be a consequence of my adroitness."---------- This is Vadim's very first time taking cocaine. For many years, Vadim has had numerous failures and frustrations. Finally, he has found something he is actually good at - snorting cocaine. He thinks his joy results from his adroitness but, oh, Vadim . . . the joy you experience just might be the result of the drug.

"I sprawl in the armchair. I feel good. Inside me, the observing ray sheds an attentive light on my sensations. I wait for an explosion in them, I wait for flashes of lightning as the consequence of the drug I have taken, but the longer it goes on, the more I satisfy myself that there is no explosion, no flashes of lightning, and neither will there be any. Cocaine, then, really doesn't have any effect on me." ---------- Such self-delusion, Vadim! Usually you're always morose, sullen and sulky but now you feel so good. And in your smugness you think cocaine isn't having any effect on you. Wake up, Vadim! Recognize what's going through your mind here is pure balderdash, bunk, bosh and bullshitsky.

"'Come on, tell me now what music is,' whisper my lips. At the bottom of my throat all the joy is gathering into a hysterically leaping lump. 'Music is the simultaneous sonic representation of the feeling of movement and the movement of feeling.' My lips repeat, whisper these words out a countless number of times, I enter into their meaning more and more, deeper and deeper, and grow exhausted with rapture." ---------- Quite the contrast: years of gloom and ill-temper and now not only rapture but overflowing rapture. Oh, magic white powder.

"I feel so good and things are so clear inside me, I'm so inordinately in love with this life, I'd like to slow everything down, spend a long time savoring the adoration of every second, but nothing at all stops, and this whole night is unrestrainedly and rapidly passing away." ---------- Ah, Vadim. If only this current state of warmth and bliss could continue without end.

"I try to bring back my thoughts, my raptures and the raptures of the bearded listeners, but the whole of this night rises up in my memory, and I become so ashamed, so mortified, that for the first time I feel truly and sincerely that I don't want to live any more." ---------- The inevitable come down. Having experienced such a high that is now a thing of the past, is there anything else worth living for? Oh, yes - the next cocaine high! Sounds like you're hooked, Vadim.

"A man thus lives not through the events of the external world, but only through the degree of the reflection of those events in his own consciousness." ---------- There is a degree of irony here since the events of Vadim's external world include the Russian Revolution of 1917. But compared to his consciousness-altering cocaine highs, even a bloody revolution comes in a distant second.

"It was the capacity of cocaine to arouse the physical sensation of happiness without any psychical dependence on the external events surrounding me, and even when the reflection of those events in my consciousness ought to have elicited melancholy, despair and grief - it was this property of cocaine that was the terribly magnetic power which I was not only unable to struggle against and resist, but unwilling too." ---------- Again, since his life now centers around cocaine, he cannot and will not be pulled away from cocaine; quite the contrary, his emotional highs and lows have everything to do with cocaine and nothing to do with the intense suffering of men, women and children in his city and country.

"While I was under the influence of cocaine, the feelings it aroused were so powerful and strong that my capacity for observing myself weakened to a degree which can be observed only in some of the mentally ill. On cocaine, my feeling Self grew to such huge dimensions that the introspective Self stopped working." ---------- In other words, Vadim now lives entirely on the level of his senses; for him, the life of the mind has vanished.

"Some strange manias would take possession of me just an hour after I began snorting: sometimes it was a mania for searching, when a box of matches was used up and I began searching for others, moving the furniture, emptying the desk drawers, knowing full well as I did so that there were no matches in the room, but continuing to search with pleasure all the same over the course of many hours uninterrupted." --------- This is only the beginning of mental and physical breakdown for Vadim. Things get worse, decidedly worse. Any guesses what is in store for Vadim on the last page?

As Toby Young wrote in the Introduction to this Modern Voices publication: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions - and, in Maslennikov's case, it is liberally sprinkled with the Devil's dandruff."

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction, by Michael Henry Heim

--Novel with Cocaine

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has the dubious honour of being the 400th book I’ve read over the last two years, the first being John Barth’s appalling Coming Soon!!! (whose three exclamation marks speak of a desperation undignified for such a dignified dignitary). If you think I’m some sort of freak who lives in a tin house with nine cats, you’d be right, only I don’t have cats and I live in a Glasgow flat with ceilings so high all the heat collects ten feet above me. As a consequence I write this enswaddled in fur (from the nine cats I skinned) and a pair of velvet-lined slippers, with a cup o’ warm coffee afore me. Check out MFSO’s review, which includes a chemical formula and more hybridised words than is healthy from a man under thirty, and check out Knig-o-lass’s review, which gushes and splutters love for this Russian curio. Me? I found the novel badly structured, slipshod, drearily eloquent like early Nabokov, bereft of character or style, and frankly an overcooked turkey. I do concede that the final chapter, esp. the mother’s suicide, gives a sharp shock, but that’s about all the novel does, gives a series of sharp shocks. Plus, cocaine only features in the last sixty pages, it’s also “novel with dull schoolboy reflections” and “novel with prostitute” for the duration. Read only if you’re desperate to out-weird your bookish friend who’s always sniffing out of print relics from yesteryear.

[knig · Rating 5 out of 5]

The gall of Nabokov scorning this novel as ‘disgusting’(which it is, but that’s beside the point. Pot? Kettle?). Disgusting, degenerate, harrowing, eternally haunting: Agayev has the uncanny ability to grasp the macabre and ply his chisel in its spent chamber: twisting, furling, stretching: convex, concave: peels it open and reams out the sinews of sin and depravity. And cocaine has nothing to do with it at all: Vadim had surrendered in the cemetery of his soul long before the white stuff left him hallowed and prostrate beneath a shivering canopy of riddled meaning left unrolled.

The novel’s themes, meme, vistas....I’ve seen them all in various manifestations in other novels. But here, well. There is a bountry of withered everywhere. Take the lack of filial piety. The scenes of depravity which unroll in the silver dimness of the storyboard, of son against mother, build up excruciatingly to a crescendo of assonance and then arrest in a tableau vivant, giving us breathing space to take in the conaissance of pure evil (not surprisingly escalating to indirect matricide). The description of Vadim’s mother is truly a haunting image that will persevere in the void sown in my heart forever.

The finale is a breathtaking texture of a trembling gloom, arched and intervalled with the solemn cords of the protagonists destroyed cohesion and finally, his swan song, as he propels ever forward in his tireless pinioned flight into oblivion.

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soundtrack: Baths - Maximalist



Spent two days a week shoving rather pricey quantities of oft-jagged euphoria up their snout, the nearest conduit to the terrible/beautiful master, the hub of experience, the center of narrative gravity, all transformed into a polis of sheer pleasure, pumping its flood 'round itself, the radiant, briefly blinding, photoflashbursts of a crackling and snapping electrical whitehotheat trumpeted its silent blaring in one set of ears alone. The clearblue afternoon visionmemory of childhood, filling with the unified dart 'n' glide of a school of novelty bubbles, piscine-swimming as ocular candy, good enough to eat and visually revel in. Bubbles become sentient lightbulbs as the sky dims. It’s all surreal fireflies and childhood bliss converging with the just-so summer heat of an eternal July 4th, roiling carefree in the head.

Them's Crashin' Words

The lonesomeness will not stand. It sits. It crouches with tremendous effort until its knee caps tremble with the fluidity of the inner rot, the ravenous appetite of each engorging, twinkling and fading bit that holds this so-called personself together. It eyes the world and does enough hand waving to slink along without wrapping the twine or gasoline-ing itself in the public square, expressing a simultaneous lack of and an overabundance of concern for what happens post-oblivion. With the fullest pains in tact it finds a proper motion in the limp-along that eats away at all the sophisticated distancing techniques of humor and irony and even nihilistic resignation, with its pursed lips always on the brink of a tear-soaked smirk that’s really not fooling itself. The sheer agony of things has to be faced head-on for exactly what it is. To purge the hurt of its power they will ratchet up the threats and complaints and unpleasant reflection of an unpleasant reality. They will refuse to step back into the well-trod and flimsily ungirded platform of pretending as if their initial judgments were somehow off the mark. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This slavemaster habit that tunnels through this mattersgrey, that rewards the futile pursuits of whittled-minded bliss, this massive blotting out of the world, this thing, this cluster of events, this dubious, desperate, resigned, deluded hunt for some respite, for some even-keel?, for something mashed together, sitting like a tumor, aglow with the manic’s sense of playfulness, pulsing in a pose of temptation with barely hidden dislodged jaw and pitiless knives of the mouth catching the ray, shed and cast off, of the fiery splotch, resistant to orbit, that wolfs down upon itself, sated into cataclysm, twin-commanding a green thumb and a scorching ire upon the slowly drifting fragments of the globe. Spreading its wings and face all around the coiled chiasma of thinking 'n' feeling, flush with tangibility, the viscosity of minds, and that cannot escape the need for and/or creation of and/or perception of meaning, no matter how fucked up it carves itself up to be. The mirror shard as scalpel, the inward-bent as surgeon.

[Lizzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

You cannot argue with a book called Novel with Cocaine. I feel a little weird giving it a rating... it's kind of like if you saw an old Russian man have a seizure under a bench in a decrepit public park somewhere and you were like, hmm, that's an ok seizure but not too convincing - here's 3 stars, and then the man screamed something unitelligible and mightily soiled himself and you were like oh! oh! make that 4 stars! damn, now that's a seizure!

Anyway, this book is classicly Russian (paraphrase sentence: "It was upon my meeting S. at the corner of L. and M. streets that I realized, in a fleeting crepuscular moment, that what little innocence I had left in my bosom was soon to be dashed at the feet of those most carnal beasts I had espied some weeks before, on N. street.") 7/8ths of this novel (memoir?) are not about cocaine at all, but about the author's highschool experiences and his affair with a woman who turns out to be married. I guess it's all supposed to be expository? I don't really know what else to say. As a former heavy drug-user, I'm always curious about others' experiences. Now I know what it was like to be an early 20th century Russian drug addict with a crappy personality? I'll stick with my own life, thanks.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Isn't the human soul somewhat like a swing, which, once given a push in the direction of humanity, is ipso facto predisposed to return in the direction of bestiality?"

The title narcotic only shows up halfway through, so folks entering to this out of curiosity to read about one losing one's nasal virginity might be disappointed.
Others won't be, for this is a dark and tremendous dive down into the basest parts of the soul, as only someone like Dostoevsky or Welsh can do better. Yes, there are drugs, yes, the narrator gleefully spreads his clap around to random girls, yes, he extemporizes with high-handed genius the sick yet mutually reinforcing duality of our natures, as quoted above, yes, he excels at hate as much as love. More surprising perhaps, then, is its gentleness and scattered sense of ablution and need for absolution that sometimes rises to its pus-scummed surface, it certainly lives up to its two-faced promise and you will leave you feeling uncomfortable in your soul and probably reaching for your own version of cocaine, depending on what prescription you recently filled.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional novel, pungent, powerful, dark and intense, and also psychologically very astute and acute. The mysterious and pseudonymous Ageyev (who only recently has been identified as an obscure personage named Mark Levi) was a writer with a superb sense of observation, especially of those little details of life and the world that strike one as absolutely true but which were not in the reader's awareness before reading about them. In a sense, like Proust and Svevo, he raises these little truths out of the reader's subconscious and plants them into his or her consciousness. I found myself nodding frequently as I read with admiration at the author's skill. But the magnificent prose is only one aspect of this book. The substance itself is morbid and grotesque. For a time, Nabokov was cited as the possible genius behind 'Ageyev', a speculation that Nakobov furiously denied, claiming that he found the novel "disgusting". And it is disgusting in many ways. It is also remarkable.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was expecting a While Nights with narcotics. This is likely more, however underdeveloped. In a sense this remains a strident meditation on decadence, a Slav Young Torless. The titular cocaine is merely a crescendo to an interesting portrait of the bestial and weird.

Remaining fascinated with reviews composed on a phone: no discernable improvement on terms of my skill, mind you.

[The Literary Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, dirty, unclean, much wisdom in its pages, the story set out what it intended to do. The drugs are actually a minuscule part of the book. The horror comes from the way the narrator's mind works and the actions that result from that. A friend pointed out that early on, the narrator speaks of having a disease, similarly to the way Dostoevsky's narrator in The Underground Man begins with "I am a sick man." After considering that, and other events and thoughts that occur in the two books, I would go so far as to say that Vadim is the embodiment of the underground man. There are many who would not like to visit the world Ageyev paints, but he painted it well, in colors of mud. Well done character study with a lot of depth.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is divided into 4 main sections (plus an epilogue): School, Sonya, Cocaine, and Reflections.

I’m giving this one 3 stars, because while the final 2 sections were very interesting to dissect, the first 2 sections were rather dry. And most of all, serious points were docked because the narrator is such a despicable, selfish human being that I resented having to spend time in his head. I like a good anti-hero, but he is not one. He’s just gross.

----------SCHOOL----------

Main character, Vadim, is 17 years old (sometime during World War 1).

He’s a total dick to his poor, sweet mother. He knowingly gives a one-night stand an unspecified STD (which has the potential to “main or kill”) and doesn’t tell her about it.

Basically, he’s an awful human being. Even for a teenage boy.

----------SONYA----------

Vadim’s favourite hobby is treating women like Kleenex. During the summer between high school and university, he’s out dicking around, victimizing and harassing girls into sleeping with his lame-ass self.

One of these girls, Nelly, has a super hot landlady, Sonya. Sonya’s married, but hates her husband. Vadim quickly falls in love with her.

Loving Sonya creates a kind of psychological split in Vadim. On the one hand, he’s sweet to Sonya. She makes him love the world, and donate to charity. But on the other hand, he talks to his friends crudely about Sonya, claiming he only spends all this time with her because she’s a great lay, and it’s all about the sex. And, of course, Vadim still treats his mother like a hybrid trash can/ATM.

While musing over these thoughts, Vadim cheats on Sonya with a random girl. He pictures Sonya doing the same thing—having sex with another man—and thinks about what a slut she’d be if she did.

“Suddenly I saw how strange it all was: I saw that if a man does what he does, he is a man, and if a woman does what he does, she is a harlot. In other words, I saw that the split between spirituality and sensuality in the male is a sign of virility, while the same split in the female is a sign of harlotry.”

Almost like there’s a double standard or something, huh?

Anyway, a little while later, Sonya sensibly breaks up with Vadim when she realizes that even her shitty husband is better than him.

----------COCAINE/REFLECTIONS----------

In university, he “loses his nasal virginity” —he does some blow with Nelly and some friends from college (but not before committing the rookie cardinal sin of breathing onto the pile of coke and scattering it everywhere. Geez Louise. You goddamn noob).

He has what might be the most coked-up thought ever written down while trying to define the word “music”: ”Music is the simultaneous representation in sound of the emotion of motion and the motion of emotion.”

All the cokeheads get a little paranoid at one point that someone was going to come into the apartment (“I, too, have caught their fears. I, too, can think of nothing more terrifying than a spry and bustling daylight person bursting in on our dark and silent room.”) but for the most part have an enjoyable trip.

This experience gives him the revelation that, all his life, he’s been working towards and using external events to make himself happy (events such as relationships or career goals), but that those external, real-world events don’t have any greater significance other than their ability to generate happiness inside of him. And cocaine can make him much happier than attaining those external things ever could, with significantly less effort.

“What if, as I was convinced, a tiny speck of cocaine could provide my organism with instantaneous happiness on a scale I had never dreamed of before? Then the need for any event whatsoever disappeared, and with it, the need for expending great amounts of work, time, and energy to bring it about. Therein lay the power of cocaine—in its ability independent of all external events, even when the reflection of the events in my consciousness would have otherwise produced feelings of grief, depression, and despair.”

Accordingly, he starts doing coke every day. A lot of coke. So much that he hallucinates regularly. He no longer gets pleasure out of it; he just becomes manic. He also compares the high and the comedown from coke to his own split nature (discussed in the Sonya section). When high, he is full of generous, loving kindness for all of humanity (Vadim at his best); when coming down off it, he experiences his most bestial, vicious feelings (Vadim at his worst).

He wonders whether this is a trait of cocaine and human nature generally (is it human nature that the more loving you are capable of being, the more evil you are also capable of being? Does one extreme bring out the other extreme?), or if this is specific to him, magnifying his already fragmented personality.

“Isn’t the human soul somewhat like a swing which, once given a push in the direction of humanity, is ipso facto predisposed to return in the direction of bestiality?”

The epilogue is written by doctors at the hospital, who note that Vadim died of cardiac arrest as a result of his cocaine addiction.

[Nicole Penney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t recall ever despising a protagonist (if he can be called that!) so much. Practically void of human emotion, he treats all women, including his own mother, like objects without value. The author truly gave us what the introduction calls an “anti-hero.”

The first two-thirds of the novel felt like a typical coming-of-age novel, and it wasn’t until the last third that cocaine finally made an appearance. We see his introduction to the drug and his experiences with addiction. I won’t spoil the ending but this was a bit of a haunting read for sure.

[Denis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doesn't this Russian novel exist in English? I read it many years ago, and it was quite a sensational revelation. A truly shocking story, in the best sense of the term, written in the thirties by a mysterious writer once thought to be Nabokov. It's about the cruelties of youth, the intensity of love, the lure of drugs. Incredibly modern, or so it felt when I read it. Another novel I wish to re-read!

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably doesn't have all that much to say about the nature of addiction (particularly when the protagonist resorts to pawning heirlooms minutes trying drugs exactly once) but does have lots of say about the universality of being a school-age asshole guy, across eras and landmasses. Steeped in self-loathing, but it's hard to say if it's actually autobiographical since it was mailed anonymously from Turkey to a literary magazine in Paris sometime in the 30s. And that is all we know about it.

[Arukiyomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very quick read this one and it’s been a while since I dipped my feet in Russian lit. This novel brought it all back to me and would be a great intro to anyone wanting to find out what this genre’s all about.

The novel is written under a pseudonym. There are still debates about who actually wrote it. But it contains all you want in a Russian novel: brooding self-absorption, moral decay, the hated or absent conscience of the individual, and the gradual plunge into doom and despair. Lovely!

The eponymous cocaine appeared much later than I thought in this brief book. But early on you get the feeling that the protagonist is heading for disaster. From almost the very first page, he treats his mother abominably. And his pursuit of pleasure is what leads, eventually, to his undoing in an orgy of snorting.

But while he descends into the dreamlike world of addiction, the writing seems to maintain its clarity. This I thought a weakness of the novel. Surely, if someone is writing their own account of drug abuse, you’d expect something a little less lucid, something more like this, in fact.

And it’s a very modernist novel in that there’s no real comment on drug abuse and its effect on society. You are left to assume that from the prose and come to your own conclusions for the most part, although here and there, Ageyev gives hints such as

The neophyte does indeed believe that the main property of cocaine is its ability to make him feel happy, much as the mouse, before it is caught, believes that the main property of mousetraps is to provide him with lard.

Subtle and deadly. Very good book. Deserves second reading.

[Guy Portman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in the years immediately before and after the Russian Revolution, Novel with Cocaine follows the life of Vadim, a Moscow adolescent and student. Vadim is prone to self-loathing and disdainful of others, none more so than his mother, whose aged appearance and shabby clothes he finds acutely embarrassing. One night he seduces a girl, this despite the fact that unbeknown to her he is suffering from a venereal disease. Later he meets Sonya, an older, married woman, whom he becomes infatuated with. However their sordid affair comes to an abrupt end when a disgruntled Sonya breaks off the relationship.

Shortly thereafter our anti-hero is introduced to cocaine. Vadim describes in intricate detail the physical and psychological effects of losing his ‘nasal virginity’, as his companions refer to it. Later that night Vadim steals his mother’s broach in order to purchase more of the drug. When his distressed mother confronts him about his pilfering, Vadim leaves home. He finds refuge at a friend’s house, where descending into addiction, he spends a great deal of time in deep contemplation.

Novel with Cocaine is a depressing, nihilistic, philosophical and at times amusing novel about adolescence and addiction that could be described as Dostoyevskian, due to its realism and the thorough psychological exploration of its main character. Though its anti-hero Vadim is a reprehensible character, the reader admires him for his profound insights into the human condition.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Em 1934, uma revista parisiense de emigrantes russos publicou, em vários números, um manuscrito, que lhe tinha chegado num embrulho proveniente de Constantinopla, com o título Narrativa com Cocaína e assinado M. Aguéev. Posteriormente foi publicado num volume único e com o título definitivo. A obra foi mal recebida pela crítica russa que o considerou escandaloso, nojento e decadente. Em 1983 foi traduzido do russo para o francês e a crítica francesa foi unânime nos elogios. Nessa altura especulou-se que o autor da obra seria Vladimir Nabokov, boato desmentido pelo filho deste no Posfácio de O Encantador. Conforme explicado por Dimitri Nabokov, o autor do romance seria um emigrante russo, de nome Mark Levi, que morreu em 1936, presumivelmente em consequência do abuso de cocaína.

A acção do romance — que decorre em Moscovo, na segunda década do Século XX — é narrada por Vladimir, que recorda os tempos de estudante, as relações de amizade, as aventuras com mulheres e as experiências com a cocaína. Termina, já todo balhelhas da coca, com umas divagações sobre a alma humana.

A história é interessante e a personagem é uma criatura asquerosa; usa e abusa das mulheres que lhe querem bem, sem quaisquer escrúpulos, para satisfação dos seus interesses pessoais. Contudo, tem consciência que procede mal. Adianta de muito...

[Sorgens Dag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este debe ser fácilmente uno de los mejores libros que he leido no este año, sino en mi vida. Una afrenta total contra los bueno y lo correcto, un desafío a la bondad y la conciencia social y su moralidad.

[Galina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Мисля си, че е по силите на руските автори да превърнат кой да е сюжет в Голяма литература.

[Saretta · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Il romanzo segue il tracollo del protagonista in diverse fasi della sua vita: prima al ginnasio, poi nella relazione con una donna di cui è innamorato fino all'incontro con la cocaina che darà il colpo di grazia rendendolo dipendente.
Il romanzo è costituito dalle riflessioni di Vadim che analizza ogni episodio della sua vita per trovarne il senso e per capire meglio se stesso e quelli che lo circondano.
Vadim è un protagonista riflessivo, questo sì, ma anche profondamente insicuro, tanto da trovare poi nella cocaina, almeno in un primo tempo, il mezzo per avere emozioni positive e una mente lucida.
Vadim vorrebbe essere brillante, autonomo e in generale interessante per le persone che lo circondano, e spesso crede di avere queste qualità; nella realtà però è consapevole di una certa mediocrità che lo contraddistingue (non è il più intelligente della classe, nè il più ricco etc...) e forse anche per questo si accanisce con atteggiamenti volutamente malvagi con le persone che lo circondano e che gli sono affezionate (come la madre e l'anziana balia che cercano sempre di accontentarlo e aiutarlo).
Un romanzo molto interessante, l'edizione ha qualche errore di editing ma, visto il costo, non mi lamento.

[Odai Al-Saeed · Rating 5 out of 5]

لم تك رواية كوكايين متفائلة كغيرها من الروايات التي خصت موضوع المخدر الأبيض الكرستالي فقد جاءت معبرة ومؤثر مغلفة في إطار حزين في كل طياتها...ولم تبحث هذه الرواية العميقة المؤثرة في الموضوع السابق فقط فقد كانت مدشنة بتخمة في أبعاد ثقافيةوموضوعية تخللتها مواضيع تبحث في لغات الجسد وفلسفته كما خاضت في مضمارالعلاقة الأسرية متغلغلة بشرح قاتم ومؤلم لعلاقة مخزية ومحزنة تخص العقوق
هذه الرواية لم تأخذ حقها الاعلامي أبدا وهي واحدة من أجرأ وأعمق الروايات التي قرأت فالقدرة السردية والفلسفية لدى المؤلف ساحرة لدرجة الابهار وقد يزيد الأمر غرابة أن المؤلف بالفعل لم تعرف هويته فهذه الرواية أرسلت لدار نشر مذيلة بهذا الاسم. كتبت في ثلاثينيات القرن الغابر في وقت كانت الرواية الروسية في أوج تألقها..كما أشيد بالترجمة الرائعة التي كانت موفقة بدرجة امتياز حيث أن حسين عمر كان رائعا متجليا بلغته المنقولة الساحرة الى أبعد مدى....رواية رائعة

[lisa_emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was instantly intrigued by this book when I saw it listed in the 1001 Books to read before you die. I had never heard of this book or of its author. I discovered that there is some speculation about the author, but most likely he is lost to history.

As for the book, if there is a category called callow-scoundrels, this book would be one of the models. The narrator exhibits terrific disdain and hatefulness. The writing captures this character magnetically; I was drawn into his world, because it is unlike mine.

[Radu Deme · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://radu-andreideme.blogspot.com/2...

[Samuel Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young anti-hero's coming-of-age campus/addiction story in 1919 Russia in under 200 pages that sticks the landing? Easily 4.5/5

[Mirela · Rating 4 out of 5]

“― E bună? Pronunţă aceste cuvinte de parcă ar fi avut în faţă un copil, clătinînd interogativ-afirmativ din capul ei cărunt.
― Buunăă, am spus eu în batjocură, fără să afirm sau să neg. Am pronunţat acest cuvînt cu o grimasă de dezgust, de parcă eram gata să vomit, în timp ce privirile noastre se întîlneau: a mea, tăioasă şi plină de ură, a ei, caldă, plină de iubire şi radiind numai suflet. Acest moment a durat mult, timp în care am urmărit cum ochii ei buni se sting, plini de nedumerire şi apoi de durere. Şi, cu cît mă simţeam mai biruitor, cu atît mai puţin simţeam şi înţelegeam sentimentul meu de ură pentru această fiinţă bătrînă şi iubitoare pe care o umileam. De aceea poate că nici nu am rezistat şi am plecat ochii primul, apucînd lingura şi începînd să mănînc din nou. Cînd, după o vreme, împăcat cu mine şi dorind să spun ceva fără importanţă, am ridicat capul, n-am putut articula o vorbă şi am sărit în picioare fără voie. Mîna în care mama ţinea lingura cu supă zăcea pe faţa de masă. În palma celeilalte mîini, sprijinite în cot, îşi ţinea capul. Buzele ei subţiri urcau strîmb pe obraz, tăindu-i faţa. Din ochii ei căprui, închişi, înconjuraţi de un evantai de riduri, curgeau lacrimi. Şi atît de neajutorat era acest biet cap bătrîn, atîta tristeţe plină de bunătate, atîta deznădejde din cauza urîtei bătrîneţi de care nimeni nu are nevoie erau în aceste lacrimi, încît, tot privind-o pe furiş, m-am trezit spunînd cu un glas fals aspru:
― Ei, nu trebuie… Ce-ţi veni… n-ai de ce!”

[Jonathan Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vadim Maslennikov watches himself behave despicably, peering over his own shoulder in wonder at the bestial depths to which he regularly and inexorably sinks. His shame, in turn, fuels ever more shameless acts. “Shamelessness,” he tells us, is a misleading word, “the principal and most passionate trait of human depravity lying in the violation of shame, not in its absence.” Vadim seeks a purity of debasement and depravity, not assailed by compassion. Thus his attempt to revel in the ruination of the poor, innocent girl he finds on a cold Moscow night is ruined, when in the course of knowingly infecting her with his venereal disease, he looks upon her childlike, naivete and feels pangs of conscience. He redeems the “wasted” encounter by taking her rare silver kopecks as a keepsake of his ignominious act.

The revolution of 1917 is mostly absent from this novel, though situated at the chronological centre of its action which follows Vadim from his school years at an elite Moscow preparatory school—where he displays his sexual callousness as a mark of machismo for his classmates—through his conflicted romance with a married woman in which his sincere affection for her lies at odds with a sexual identity that responds only to debasement, and finally to a cocaine addiction which saps him of his monstrous vigor and leaves nothing but his demons behind.

While cocaine creates for Vadim the illusion of facilitating his natural inclinations to philosophize, it more forcefully dissipates everything that fuelled his life but his own well-founded self loathing. The novel itself seems to dissipate at the point where Vadim’s romance with cocaine begins. The final two sections of the novel are clipped and underdeveloped, lacking the robustness of character and action of the earlier sections. It is unclear whether this is a stylistic contrivance meant to parallel the dissolution of the first person narrator’s psyche, or simply the natural result of narrating a man into a closed room. In the novel’s reflective final part, Vadim attempts to account for his bestial nature, and although he isn’t convinced by his own hypothesis, the ideas find tantalizing resonance with the novel’s effaced historical context.

Vadim addresses a phantasmagoric collection of the future prophets of mankind, imploring them to leave mankind alone. “Do not try to fan the flames of lofty sentiments in our souls; do not try to make us better than we are. For so long as we bad, we limit ourselves to petty felonies; as we grow better, we kill. . . . The push we tend to give our spiritual swings—the push up toward humanity—and the swoop down towards bestiality that inevitably ensues have left a bloody trail through the history of mankind, and the more passionately an age pushes in the direction of the spirit, the more terrible are the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name.”

The drug-fuelled “reflections” of the final part are less compelling than the earlier sections of the novel in which he still has interactions with real people: his pitifully destitute and devoted mother, long suffering at his cold and heartless hands, his rhetorically brilliant and politically passionate classmates, and most of all, Sonya, the beautiful and enviably self-possessed woman whose decisiveness and generosity is a foil to Vadim’s self destructive and consciously pathetic behaviour. Sonya sees Vadim for who he truly is, revealing the full extent of her comprehension in a devastating letter of rejection in which Vadim could not fail to see his perverse nature exposed plainly. If Vadim is beset with a compulsion to betray his own happiness, and damn himself with his odious acts, this should be the emotional climax of the novel. After this, there is nothing left for him to do but destroy himself with cocaine.

Novel with Cocaine is not ultimately about Moscow in 1916, nor is it about cocaine. It is a psychological portrait, which for all its forthrightness is nonetheless baffling. The protagonist wonders aloud at his own actions, and we stare incredulously as well. We leer, as he leers from within his own skull. It is compelling and sensational, and if you have grappled with your own self-destructive tendencies, it is hard to dismiss Vadim as an unrepentant degenerate. Vadim’s perversity, while exceptional, is not an exotic fantasy. Much less exceptional is poverty with which he contends, and the anguish he experiences at his inability to translate self-awareness into any kind of healthy agency.

M. Ageyev apparently wrote an additional short story, before disappearing forever. I’ll be looking for it.

[Axel Ainglish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly it is not an ideological or philosophical novel. Think it isl about love and friendship (or the lack of it) in a teens group.. But what may remain after the reading of this mistery author, is the ambiance surrounding them. At least that happened to me. Although a philosophy underlies everything. The logical one according with the times they live in. Nihilism presides the whole work. It guides their descent into unknown. Think the author was a nihilist he himself. Few things are known about the man hidden under this pseudonym. Remains a sentence that seems he used to say to his pupils when teaching in Turkey ( where he went fleeing from Russia) years after: "one has to try everything in this life". Well, he may have experienced a bit of what he wrote. Has to be said it is a cruel book too, inspite of that evanescent, dreamy atmosphere he so well sketches. Some readers, unaware of this cruelty factor, disliked or criticised the work. But me think is a pitty he did not kept on writing. For this is an unknown masterpiece, a small literature jewel. Deals about a group of misfits, smart teens lost under the charm of their unexpectedly vanishing world (zarism last days). Who knows what will the future bring. They may not like it, seems to be the feeling. And face to uncertainty nothing seems to matter.Trapped in this whirlwind, they abandon themselves into their communal solitude and despair. They let things go, without caring anymore, and we follow their drift. They go into cocaine, but that is not the main thing. Nor in the novel, neither in their mislead lives. Their relations and the poisoned beauty of the ambiance was the cue for me. But remember, this is not a novel for delicate stomachs.
To end with, just read it. Think you will like it. May leave its fingerprint in some corner of your mind. As it did with me.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A very readable, coming of age, confessional novel about addiction and dependency. Set in Moscow, 1916 to 1919, the novel is about Vadim Maskennikov, a seventeen year old in 1916. Vadim writes in his diary about his school friends, his one off sexual liaison with a young woman when he has venereal disease, his affair with Sonya and his experience with cocaine. He treats his mother shamefully during this time, being embarrassed by her, not recognising her in public and stealing from her.

Here is a quote from the book that provides an example of the author’s writing style:
‘I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake up in the middle of the night and begin to realise, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.’

This book was first published in Russia in 1934.

[Eve Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best novels I've ever read. Why? Because it has the two elements I love in books the most:

Flowing language, which doesn't underestimate my understanding of the story as a reader but challenges me enough that I find it interesting and at best, captivating.
A story that takes me to another place, another time, another whatever when all the time it's this place and it's right now and it's the whatever I go through. In other words, it's hugely relatable, told so well it stands the test of time and it's not some fantasy in never-ever-where, it happened here and it could be going on right as I write this.
Recommended with a knowing smile that says "You'll like it."