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 is 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."
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