Novel with Cocaine

The story of the creation of “The Novel with Cocaine” resembles a real detective investigation. For half a century, specialists engaged in fierce disputes among themselves trying to determine who the author really was. Even a version was proposed (the author is N. Struve) that the novel belonged to Vladimir Nabokov. D. S. Merezhkovsky noted that the language of “The Novel with Cocaine” is not inferior to one side to Bunin and on the other to Sirin, but at the same time it is somehow similar to Dostoevsky—“only Dostoevsky of the thirties of our century.”

As a result of this controversy, most literary scholars recognized Mark Levi as the author. In 1997, documentary evidence appeared to support this claim. A. I. Serkov published letters from Mark Levi to Nikolai Otsup that had previously been kept in the latter’s personal archive at the Institute of Slavic Studies (Paris), thus finally proving authorship of “The Novel with Cocaine.”

In one of the letters, in particular, were the final, concluding lines of the novel that were omitted in the manuscript and therefore not included in any edition: “This was all that remained after Vadim Maslennikov, if you don’t count the worn-out linen, the torn dress, and the small, yellow glass vial, with a label that read: 1 gr. Cocain hydrohlor. E. Merk in Darmstadt.”

The most ordinary young man Vadim Maslennikov, like many of his peers, tries to find answers to age-old questions: Who am I? Why do I live? What is the meaning of life? Making sense of it turns out to be very difficult. A multitude of temptations takes hold of him, drawing him into a whirlwind of misunderstanding, cruelty, violence, and disappointment in life and in people.

Publisher: Vladimir Vorobyov

© M. Ageev (heirs)
©&℗ IP Vorobyov V.A.
©&℗ ID SOYUZ