Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0003159, Fri, 29 May 1998 14:13:31 -0700

Subject
Ageyev's _Novel with Cocaine_ (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. The identity of M. Ageyev has been firmly established as I
recall, but I don't remember where I read about it. Can anyone help with
this?
-----------------------------------------
From: Anton Nikkilä <anton.nikkila@pp.inet.fi>


I am translating M. Ageyev's Roman s kokainom from Russian into Finnish,
and I am trying to find information about Ageyev's identity. I have read
your article "Nabokov and M. Ageyev's Novel with Cocaine", as well as
Nikita Struve's "Roman-zagadka", Raoul Eshelman's "Why People Stupefy
Themselves", and prefaces to the first Soviet publication of the novel (by
Dmitri Volchek in Rodnik magazine) and the English (by Michael Henry Heim)
and Swedish (by Hans Björkegren) translations of the book.
All these articles are from mid-to-late 80's, and I'm wondering if anything
new has come up since then concerning Ageyev's "biography". Volchek, for
example, mentioned Gabriel Superfin's hypothesis that the novel is
autobiographical and the author's name could be found by going through the
lists of students in Moscow University's law faculty and Kreimanskaya
gimnaziya (in which Superfin believes "Maslennikov" studied) in 1915-1919.
I would be very thankful if you could point me to any other sources or
share any information you might have.

Anton Nikkila