Books - Cocain Romance

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	Books - Cocain Romance

The Cocain Romance, or the Novel, With Cocaine, is a mysterious Russian novel published in 1934 in a Parisian émigré publication Illustrated Russia and subtitled "Confessions of a Russian opium-eater". Its author was given as M. Ageyev.

The Cocain Romance is said to be a Dostoevskyan psychological novel of ideas, which explores the interaction between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its frank portrayal of an adolescent's cocaine addiction. The story relates the formative experiences of narrator Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the novel's obsession with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name.

Following the original publication, the novel was scorned as decadent and disgusting, to use the term applied to it by Vladimir Nabokov. The similarities with Nabokov's style, however, led to many speculations as to whether this could be one of his mystifications. In 1983 the novel was translated into French and published to nearly unanimous praise. Today, Novel, With Cocaine counts John Updike and Will Self among its admirers and is said to have laid the path for William S. Burroughs to pen similar examinations of junky excess.

Quotes

"Early one morning I, Vadim Maslennikov, set off for school (I was going on seventeen at the time) having forgotten the envelope with the first-semester fees Mother had left me in the dining room the day before."

"Before I came in contact with cocaine I assumed that happiness was an entity, while in fact all human happiness consists of a clever fusion of two elements: (1) the physical feeling of happiness, and (2) the external event providing the psychic impetus for that feeling."

"I would stroll down the boulevards and try to catch the eye of every passing woman. I never, as the saying goes, 'undressed them' with my glance, nor did I feel any carnal desire for them. In that feverish state, which might have inspired another, say to write poetry, I would simply stare into the eyes of all women walking in the other direction and wait for a similarly terrifying, wide-eyed look in response. I never accosted a woman who responded with a smile, because I knew that anyone who smiled at a look like mine could only be a prostitute or a virgin."

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