Novel with Cocaine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Novel with Cocaine, is a novel first published in 1934 in a Russian émigré literary magazine Chisla (Numbers) under a pen name M. Ageyev. The English translation of the title fails to convey the double meaning of the Russian "Роман," meaning both "novel" and "romance".
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."
