Novela con cocaína

"For a man in love all women are women, except the one he loves, whom he considers a person. For a woman in love all men are persons, except the one she loves, whom he considers a man ". Reflections like this, in a novel otherwise full of infrequent revelations about sexuality and gender roles, and certainly unprecedented elements such as cocaine addiction, must have attracted the attention, at the beginning of the 1930s, of the group of émigrés. Russians who edited the Cifras magazine in Paris and to whose editorial office the manuscript of Novela con cocaína arrived, under the pseudonym M. Aguéiev. The paternity of the novel, which came to be attributed to Nabókov and would not be definitively clarified until 1994, has been an enigma ever since. But the commotion was justified by the extraordinary originality of the work, a narration in autobiographical form, set in Moscow on the eve of the Revolution, of a young man impelled by "the desire to give my personality a singular character", from his last years in the Institute until his imprisonment in the solitary universe of "unfoldings" of cocaine. Bold, profound and uncomfortable, with a vision of the world that is an insult to our most luminous, tender and pure notion, that is, "the human soul", this is an essential novel of the 20th century, for the first time presented in direct translation from Russian.