DN:...such a stupefyingly
inane canard as the attribution of Levy-Agheyev's Novel with Cocaine to
Vladimir Nabokov's pen ... 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...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...But suspicion has sneaked out that some of the
neo-capitalists of the ex-Soyuz were more disingenuous than naïve...the profits
to be made from whatever use they could improvise for the Nabokov
name....
EDNote: In a rare and fleeting spare moment today I attempted to pull
up some of the articles demonstrating VN's non-authorship...
JA: "The
Enchanter": I seem to recall some of the same stuff about how bad you
thought the style of Novel With Cocain was itself precluding the possibility of
N.'s authorship, though your critical snipes seem funnier here than in the intro
or afterward I recall having read awhile back.
JM: Our ED's "rare and fleeting
spare moment" touched my heart. This is why I separated a
wealth of spare moments to get snippets from
DN's "On a Book Entitled The Enchanter"
and follow JA's recollections about the issue:
"The timing of this public debut of The
Enchanter is not without an amusing and instructive coincidental
sidelight. In 1985, in Paris, there began an energetic one-man campaign to
attribute to Vladimir Nabokov a pseudonymous, quite un-Nabokovian book from the
mid-thirties entiled Novel with Cocaine.[...]Falling as it does whithin
the very limited realm of rediscovered Nabokoviana, The Enchanter is a
most appropriate example of the strkingly original prose Nabokov-Sirin produced
in his most mature - and final- years as a n ovelist in his mother
tongue[...] For anyone who may harbor lingering doubts about the authorship of
the other book, a quick comparison of its substance and style with those of
The Enchanter should suffice to put the final round of shot into this
moribund canard[...] A brief account of this bazarre affair is,
nevertheless, perhaps in order[...] To support his thesis, Struve adduced
sentences from Novel with Cocaine that, according to him, are "typical
of Nabokov." Struve's assertions were taken up in a letter to the (London) Times
Literary Supplement, 9 August 1985, from Julian Graffy of the University of
London, who referrred to Struve's "detailed analysis of the secondary themes,
structural devices, semantic fields[whatever those may be] and metaphors" of
N with C, all of which are found, on the basis of repeated quotation
and comparison...to be quintessentially Nabokovian"[...]One look at Agheyev's
style precules the need to rebut the rest of Struve's arguments[...] In his 1986
book Field ventilates the hypothesis that Novel with Cocaine might have
been a deliberate mystification by Nabokov or by someone else. He ends by
affirming, nonetheless, that "it can be said with absolute certainty...that
there is some link between the work of Agheyev and Sirin," because
there happens to be a partial assonance between the names of Agheyev's character
Sinat and Nabokov's Cincinnatus[... a...]connection that falls into the same
category of scholarship as, say, Field's overblown claptrap[...] But let us
leave Field among his ruins [...] to bury the Agheyev matter[...]