Odd Jobs (99 page)

The possibility has been raised, by the Russian émigré scholar N. A. Struve, that
Novel with Cocaine
, by M. Ageyev (a pseudonym), is in truth by the late Vladimir Nabokov. The novel takes its youthful hero, Vadim Maslennikov, up to 1919, the year Nabokov left Russia; both Vadim and Vladimir were born in 1899; and, according to Mr. Struve, M. Ageyev’s only other known prose work, a short story entitled “A Rotten People,” appeared in an émigré magazine,
Vstrechi
, to which Nabokov had promised—but never, it seems, delivered—material.
Novel with Cocaine
first manifested itself as an unsolicited manuscript sent from Istanbul to the Paris-based journal
Chisla;
it was serially published there, in part, and then issued as a book in 1936. Contemporary reviewers found it rather thrillingly decadent, and even pornographic, but its author’s attempts to emigrate to Paris on the strength of its
succès de scandale
came to nothing. “Ageyev” vanished.
^†
In 1983, his novel was published in
French to such high praise as “Mr. Ageyev is a genius” (Le
Point
), “A book in the league of Thomas De Quincy’s
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
” (
Temps Économie Littéraire
), and “Mr. Ageyev has thrown his life into this novel. Finally, he is rewarded by immortality” (
Vendredi-Samedi-Dimanche
).
Novel with Cocaine
has its merits and becomes fascinating in its second half, but I very much doubt that Nabokov wrote it.

On the practical level, Nabokov after 1960 used the luxuries of leisure and attention won for him by his best-selling
Lolita
to supervise, lovingly and pedantically, the English translation of his youthful Russian-language works, and there seems no reason, when even his old chess problems were sifted and selectively preserved, that such a large and significant souvenir as this novel would be ignored. Further, what Nabokov himself neglected to collect (such as his academic lectures and a number of plays), his estate, under the guidance of his widow and son, has been bringing into print. The Nabokovs steadfastly disown Ageyev and his work.

On the literary level, the novel is intensely, derivatively Dostoevskian; yet Nabokov loathed Dostoevsky. Vadim Maslennikov can’t stop craving humiliation and demonstrating human perversity. Like Dostoevsky’s
Underground Man, he hops about absurdly from mood to anti-mood: “Thus, taking a clean shirt from the wardrobe, the only silk shirt I owned, I threw it to the floor after a cursory inspection—the shoulder seam had begun to come undone—and trampled it underfoot as if I had a dozen of them. When I cut myself shaving, I continued to scrape the razor over the gash, pretending I could not feel it in the least.… After a sip of coffee I pushed my cup aside like a spoiled brat, though the coffee was perfectly good and I wanted to go on drinking it.” His own behavior constantly takes him by surprise: “But when, inwardly composed and wishing to say something trivial, I again raised my head, I surprised myself by leaping out of my chair instead.” He is morbid and self-destructive and vortically introspective, whereas the young heroes of early Nabokov novels like
Mary
and
Glory
are characterized by a certain robust innocence, a healthy willingness to be enraptured by the world. On the stylistic level, Ageyev does now and then strike off images reminiscent of Nabokov’s eccentric precision: a man is observed “cleaning the door handle with whiting, his free hand following the same pattern as the hand that was doing the work,” and we see a “circus poster of a beauty in tights leaping through a torn hoop, her peach-colored thigh pierced by the nail holding the poster in place.” The hero specifies, “I would stand at the window for long periods of time, a cigarette in the catapult of my fingers, and try to count—through the deep-blue smoke from the tangerine tip and the filthy gray smoke from the cardboard filter—the number of bricks in the neighboring wall.” But such hyperrealism (the “catapult” of the posed fingers, the two shades of cigarette smoke) could be learned from Bely and the Symbolists. Ageyev often overdoes it:

And there is a sentimental excess, too, that the dispassionate, ironic young Nabokov would have disdained. Vadim, having financially exhausted his mother, turns and shamelessly borrows from their faithful old servant, Nanny: “I knew she had accumulated that money through years of toil and was saving it for the almshouse to assure herself a corner in her old age when she could no longer work for a living—yet still I took it. As she handed me the money, she sniffled and blinked, ashamed of showing me her joyful tears of love and self-abnegation.”

If there are many passages that even the immature Nabokov would never have let his pen slip into, there are some that lie outside his vision. Ageyev was at home in depths of suffering that Nabokov saw in aloof overview, reduced to a pattern.
Novel with Cocaine
is one of those youthful works wherein we can feel the writer getting better as he goes along. Its first and longest chapter, “School,” seems labored and puffed-up compared with, say, the schoolboy parts of
Bend Sinister
. The next, “Sonya,” rather more successfully diagrams the intricate vanity of an adolescent offered an adult love experience. Vadim refuses to tell Sonya he loves her, on this fancy reasoning:

Sonya’s farewell letter to him couches with epigrammatic force a number of bleak truths about relationships. Theirs, she writes, has reached that point where “all one of the parties has to do is tell the other the truth—the whole truth, do you understand? the utter truth—for that truth to turn into an indictment.” The longer such a relationship lasts, “the more persistently both parties simulate their former intimacy and the more strongly they feel that terrible enmity which never develops between strangers but often between people very close to each other.”
She ends, “Your relationship to me is a kind of unending fall, a constant impoverishment of the emotions, which, like all forms of impoverishment, humiliates more the more the riches it supplants.”

The affair thus eloquently dismissed, and school over, the stage is bare for the astonishing chapter, “Cocaine,” that gives this long-forgotten novel its modern relevance and enduring interest. The strained, gaudy style seems stripped to a new vividness even before Vadim encounters the drug: “The frost was hard and dry. Everything felt ready to crack. As the sleigh pulled up to the arcade, I heard high-pitched metallic steps on all sides and saw smoke rising in white columns from all the roofs. The city seemed to hang in the sky like a gigantic icon-lamp.” When he comes to take cocaine, every detail—the purchase, the distribution among the party of users, the snorting, and the sensations—is rendered with a cool and edgy clarity:

The ups, the downs, the exhilaration and despair, and the brutal plunge into abject addiction follow in masterly fashion, capped by a fully developed theory on the psychology of self-ruin:

Cocaine so affects the consciousness that “the need for any event whatever disappeared and, with it, the need for expending great amounts of work, time, and energy to bring it about.” Slavic mysticism here shows a sinister anarchic face, and we are almost relieved to discover that, while
Vadim hurries to his inevitable end, the Revolution has occurred, bringing its enforced order.

The dire results of that Revolution are, with the bewildering mixture of slapstick and rage that used to be called “black humor,” tumbled before us by the expatriate Yuz Aleshkovsky in his novel
Kangaroo. Kangaroo
has waited not fifty years but over ten for its presentation to American readers; it was finished, Mr. Aleshkovsky tells us in a brief autobiography supplied by his publishers, in 1975, whereupon he realized “quite clearly the impossibility of continuing this double life [that is, writing for samizdat] and that I longed to devote myself to writing without compromise.” He now lives in Middletown, Connecticut. His underground novel makes no compromise with the American reader, who is expected to know and care, without benefit of footnote or appendix, who or what Ordzhonikidze, the Chelyuskin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Chekists, Ilya Ehrenburg, Ivan Pyriev, Radishchev, Zoya Fyodorova, Tukhachevsky, Kirov, Karatsupa, Kulaks, Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Yuri Levitan, Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Zelinsky-Nesmeyanov gas, Joseph Vissarionovich, and zeks are or were. Our daunted American reader is further expected to pick the serious satirical strands from a grotesque, scatological, backward-looping farrago involving the conviction of a Russian pickpocket and criminal by name of Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera, alias Cariton Ustinych Newton Tarkington, for “the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905.” The trial occurs in 1949; the charge was cooked up by a primitive computer and is substantiated by a film made of the reconstructed incident. KGB ruses of enormous complication seek to persuade Fan Fanych that he is (a) a kangaroo (b) in a spaceship. He spends six years in Siberia, killing rats with the aid of a third eye developed by sheer will power at the back of his head and enduring debates of Communist fine points with fervent Old Bolsheviks of whom the leader appears to be the famous Chernyshevsky (1828–89). Fan Fanych remembers while under durance or en route his earlier curious involvements with Hitler in 1929 and the Yalta Conference in 1945; he returns to a de-Stalinized Moscow in 1955, finds his apartment full of sparrow nests, and falls in love with a girl he glimpsed just before packing to go to the Lubyanka. Finally, he locates his old friend Kolya, to whom he is somehow telling all this, much as Portnoy is delivering his complaint to a psychiatrist. The analogy with Philip Roth’s exuberant demolition of bourgeois inhibitions may illuminate why
Kangaroo
struck me as so grindingly
unfunny, albeit prankish: to relish unrepressed prose, we must have had some experience of the repression, and we must be able to hear the voice.
Kangaroo
is told in that heavily slangy Russian which drives translators to revive such stale English expressions as “mug,” “screwball,” “shoot the breeze,” and “off his [her, its] rocker.” While a patriotic citizen of the free West must be politically flattered by so detailed and vehement a blasphemy against the Soviet system, it makes deadly reading if you’ve never been a believer and don’t know the iconography.

Only when
Kangaroo
floats free of its political burden does it stir a smile. In inflation-plagued Germany, our down-and-out hero has his overcoat and suit “turned”—torn apart and resewn inside out, to show the unworn side of the cloth. His clothes take revenge, with an animation that recalls the bedevilled and bedevilling objects of the old Chaplin films: “For some reason my whole body’s twitching inside the suit, as if there’s a flea biting me, or a sharp little splinter scratching me.… I can tell my rotten jacket’s doing it on purpose, just to make me look like an idiot, and my pants are giving it moral support. They’re riding up my knees in creases, and keep rustling. And my pockets are moaning like seashells, ‘Oo-oo-oo.’ ” Here the referent—wearing clothes—is generally human, and the absurd can be measured against the actual and its degree of exaggeration appreciated. But in this Soviet system conceived as sheer demonism—“sucking people’s blood just for laughs, destroying innocent souls, wearing out their strength and keeping the human spirit humiliated for half a century”—we do not quite know where we are, and hardly dare laugh in the dark.
Kangaroo
translates a work whose intended readers can all read Russian.

A
LONE
T
OGETHER
, by Elena Bonner, translated from the Russian by Alexander Cook. 264 pp. Knopf, 1986.

For a period of several months about a year ago, residents of New England were now and then treated to the sight, on television, of a small iron-haired lady, with thick eyeglasses and a wary smile, being
ambushed by reporters and cameras while trying to mind her own business. Her name was Elena Bonner, and her business was a mixture of medical and familial matters: she was getting her ailing heart, eyes, and right leg attended to at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and she was visiting her aged mother, her daughter and son, and her three grandchildren in nearby Newton. Her husband would have liked to accompany her but could not; he is the Soviet Union’s foremost dissident, the physicist Andrei Sakharov, and was at that time held in internal exile in the Russian city of Gorky. It was extraordinary, indeed, that Bonner had received permission to visit this country, for she had recently been convicted of slander against the Soviet state and social system and been sentenced to five years of exile in Gorky. Her husband, believing that Soviet medicine could not be trusted with her drastic health problems, had several times undertaken a hunger strike to secure her permission to travel abroad. The couple had together staged a seventeen-day hunger strike in late 1981 which did secure the freedom of Liza Alexeyeva, the wife of Bonner’s son, Alexei Semyonov, to emigrate and join her husband, who had already left the U.S.S.R., in Massachusetts. But in 1984 and 1985 the Soviet authorities seemed determined to suppress both Sakharov’s hunger strike and all publicity concerning it. In the Gorky Regional Clinical Hospital, they force-fed him, sometimes with painful and humiliating violence, and forbade visits to him from his wife; at the same time they contrived a number of films, distributed to the West through the agency of the West German newspaper
Bild
, showing the Sakharovs apparently healthy and happy in Gorky. In 1985, however, Alexei staged his own hunger strike, in Washington, right next to the Soviet embassy, and the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was travelling in the West and promoting a fresh Soviet image. Word abruptly came down that Bonner could go abroad, provided she did not give interviews to the press. She was nevertheless an object of much interest to the television cameras; as it happened, she was usually shown smoking, with the unfiltered, reckless absorption of one to whom lung irritation is a relatively minor problem. Scandalized American viewers, no longer used to seeing even bad guys light up on the screen, wrote letters of concern and protest to the newspapers and the television stations. At least one of the many doctors ministering to her ills (she eventually underwent a six-bypass heart operation and an operation on the artery of her leg) felt obliged to make a public statement that she was being urged to stop. And I
believe that, by the time her five-month stay in this country was over, she had given up smoking, to the satisfaction of many.