synopsis:

'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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

The real achievement of this novel is its refusal to dissolve into a simplistic allegory or palliative. Its ironies are sophisticated and its pessimism is tough-minded. 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.

on this book:

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. 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 émigré 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.

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.