Dear Friends,
It is hard to believe that such a stupefyingly inane canard as the
attribution of Levy-Agheyev's Novel with Cocaine
to Vladimir Nabokov's pen should once again float to the surface. This
preposterous notion was clamorously and conclusively scotched some 15
years
ago, after having been so copiously discussed that I can attribute its
reappearance only to a bad joke or to the total internet illiteracy
prevalent in some quarters. Sorry, but anybody who calls this "one of
the best books in my recent memory" must have a cocaine-eroded memory
himself. As for my father, he wrote on many themes, and his works are
peopled by beings of many kinds, from spies to dwarves to Siamese
twins, most of them totally imagined. Having known him pretty well, I
can reassure the concerned reader, writer, or psychiatrist that he was
never a cokehead. On the other hand, it is well known that cocaine was
all the rage in the mid-twenties, and one didn't have to wait long for
it to become a literary drug of choice. Whether it matters or not, "A
Matter of Chance" was a matter of imagination, while Novel with
Cocaine was the work of druggie, who in fact died in an Istanbul
jail from the consequences of an overdose.
However, for the benefit of the unconvinced, let me backtrack a bit to
the pretty stale business of Levy-Agheyev's Novel with Cocaine
and Nikita Struve's attribution of that mediocre little book to my
father. By now Struve's thesis has been exploded in every detail, the
world over, and the Moscow classmates Levy describes in his novel have
even been identified. To my mind, all the detective work expended to
trace Levy-Agheyev's life, his long affair with Lydia Chervinskaya, his
drug-induced death, his tomb in
Istanbul; a publisher's imposition of a pseudonym that did not sound
Jewish, and so on, was overkill. Any reasonably observant reader of
Nabokov knows he had never been to Moscow, and tended not to set works
in
which factual detail was important in existing locales that he did not
know
intimately. And if that reader knows Russian and is of sound mind he
will recognize the most important thing: Nabokov's culture and
style
would have categorically precluded such Agheyevian locutions, to name a
few of very many, as zhibko pakhlo kukhney, poyti v kinoshku,
priuteshen, mne zhelalos', or on grozno rïgnul
["he gave a terrifying burp"]. Poor, pathetic Struve! Perhaps the
strangest thing of all is that this obsessed nincompoop, with his
churchly fixations and his unacademic methods, should be any kind of
professor at all, much less an assistant at the Sorbonne. The only
reason to exhume this decomposing canard was the recent re-publication
of the book in Russia with a long essay by Struve, again pounding the
Nabokovian nail. He has since been riding other coattails, leaving l'affaire
Agheyev
to other fools. But suspicion has sneaked out that some of the
neo-capitalists of the
ex-Soyuz were more disingenuous than naïve, and less interested in
bibliographical matters than in the profits to be made from whatever
use they could improvise for the Nabokov name.Those who are still
curious -- and uninformed -- can wikigoogle to their hearts' content. I
find the business far too boring and too time-consuming to re-hash.
-Dmitri Nabokov