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Novel with Cocaine
is narrated by a young Russian hedonist living in Moscow during the tumultuous years of
1916 to 1919. As the country plunges deeper into the First World War, Vadim Maslennikov
plunges instead into prostitutes. When the Communist Revolution begins to unfold, Vadim
prefers to unfold packets of cocaine and narcotize himself into oblivion.
This is a cold-eyed
and unsettling novel, told with sardonic humor and voluptuous imagery. As we follow
Vadim’s downward spiral into addiction, we’re confronted with the classic
opposition between grim social reality and the insatiable human desire for bodily
pleasure. Surprisingly, the novel’s concerns are not overtly political. The
Revolution is nothing but distant thunder to Vadim’s glazed perceptions. He is
disdainful both of bourgeois privilege and smug Communist ideology. But the harshest
judgments are reserved for his own self-loathing and the contradiction he perceives within
his psyche: "sensuality and spirituality were for some reason completely separate in
me."
The publishing
history of Novel with Cocaine is as startling as the book itself. The author’s
name, M. Ageyev, is a pseudonym for a writer whose identity is no longer known. (At least
one scholar is convinced that the writer was Vladimir Nabokov, but this theory is almost
universally dismissed.) The manuscript was originally published in the early 1930s
in a Paris-based Russian-language literary journal, and shortly thereafter in book form.
The author was presumed to be an emigre living in Istanbul. Apparently, his plans to
settle in Paris never materialized. Novel with Cocaine was largely forgotten until
rediscovered in the 1980s and translated into French, then into English. As to the fate of
the author, it is all too easy to suspect the worst. Translator Michael Henry Heim, in his
introduction to the 1998 Northwestern University Press edition of the novel, suggests that
the most likely scenario is that sometime in the 1930s Ageyev "returned to the Soviet
Union, and any emigre returning at the time of Stalin’s purges faced almost certain
arrest and deportation to the death camps."
The intriguing
question as to what extent Novel with Cocaine is autobiographical must remain a
mystery. One’s suspicions are that much of the book derives from an intimate
familiarity with cocaine addiction. The passages detailing the furtive procurement of the
drug and the elaborate rituals surrounding its use are remarkable for their documentary
vividness. Especially convincing are descriptions of the "quietly pulsating core of
exaltation" that define the drug’s intensity and allure. Drinking a cup of
coffee while high, or smoking a cigarette, becomes merely "a vent for unbearable,
surplus euphoria." Of an equal extreme are the "unbounded disgust" and
sickness that engulf Vadim when the effects of the drug wear off.
Cocaine
doesn’t, in fact, enter the narrative until the final third of the novel. The earlier
portions of the book are taken up with a somewhat more traditional coming-of-age story.
Vadim is seventeen years old, bright in school but disinterested. He is being treated by a
doctor for syphilis, but even before the symptoms have receded he is debating whether to
sleep with another woman, knowing full well that he risks passing the disease on to her.
Vadim’s home
life is miserable and money is scarce. We learn that his father died a year or so ago -
probably in the war - and that his mother remains deeply mournful. She is mistreated
or ignored by Vadim at virtually every turn. When she comes to the school in shabby
clothes to pay her son’s overdue semester fees, students ridicule the disheveled
woman. Vadim pretends not to recognize her. In a later chapter, he will beat her and steal
from her to help fuel his cocaine habit. Only when he is dosed on the drug does Vadim feel
"the sweet shudder of love" for his mother.
If Novel with
Cocaine can be said to have a moral conscience - at least early on - it is perhaps the
character of Vasily Burkewitz, the brilliant classmate whom Vadim idolizes. Burkewitz
delivers a dazzling classroom oration on the historical roots of economic disparity.
Later, he lectures a fellow student during recess on the evils of anti-Semitism, and in a
remarkable scene, he takes a priest to task for not speaking out against the war with
Germany, a war which Burkewitz labels "fratricide" because so many students have
lost their fathers on the battlefield. Yet - in one of the novel’s crowning ironies -
the intellectual exuberance of Burkewitz seems to mirror Vadim’s overwrought
sensuality, one route leading to Communist ideology, the other to cocaine addiction. When
Burkewitz grows into a hardline revolutionary, it is a transformation that Vadim cannot
tolerate:
I had tried several times to renew my acquaintance with Burkewitz, but stopped seeing him altogether when it proved impossible for the two of us to find a common language. Burkewitz had become a revolutionary, and the only way to talk to him was to wax indignant over the civic sins of others or confess one’s own sins against the commonweal. I found this attitude odious and humiliating. While I was accustomed to hiding my feelings behind a veil of cynicism or, at best, making a joke of them, Burkewitz used his highflown ideals to condemn both humor and cynicism...
The real achievement of this mysterious and evocative novel is its refusal to dissolve into a simplistic allegory or palliative. Its ironies are sophisticated and its pessimism is tough-minded. A fascinating section titled "Reflections" combines Vadim’s horrific drug hallucinations with a meditation on the psychology of inertia. If Vadim’s despair is ultimately incurable, he nevertheless comes to understand that an addict’s compulsion is born of the same desire that compels a Communist or a capitalist, a businessman or a humanitarian: "The reason behind human activity, as diverse as that activity may be, is always one: man’s need to bring about events in the external world which, when reflected in his consciousness, will make him feel happiness."
