Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter

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 the bizarre affair is, nevertheless, perhaps in order. Early in 1985, in the Paris-based Messenger of the Russian Christian Movement , Professor Nikita Struve of the Sorbonne affirmed with great conviction that Novel with Cocaine , by one “M. Agheyev,” written in the early thirties in Istanbul and published soon thereafter in the Paris émigré review Numbers , was in fact the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

To support this 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 referred 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.”

There have since been other echoes of Struve’s theory in several publications in Europe and in the United States.

One can cite numerous deficiencies in Agheyev’s style—blatantly incorrect forms, for instance, like “zachifynul” (for “sneezed”) or “ispol ’zovyvat’ ” (for “to use”)—that are obvious to anyone with a knowledge of Russian. It is amazing that a Sorbonne specialist in Russian language and literature like Struve, or a London University professor of Slavonic studies like Graffy could have confused the incompletely educated Agheyev’s often vulgar or incorrect locutions with Nabokov’s precise and subtle style. As Dmitri Savitzky notes in an article refuting Struve’s theory in Russian Thought (Paris, 8 November 1985), Nabokov’s Russian possesses the impeccable rhythm of classical poetry, while Agheyev’s is “contrived, jolting, uneven.” One look at Agheyev’s style precludes 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 [12]and Nabokov’s Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading .

The Sinat-Cincinnatus connection falls into the same category of scholarship as, say, Field’s overblown claptrap about an extramarital affair, the total tripe about secret heavy drinking, the nonsensical conjectures about Father’s death, or the contention that Nabokov, in his letters to his mother, addressed her as “Lolita” (whereon Field constructs a typical house of marked cards). In the latter case his reasoning goes as follows: Father, with the natural reserve of a gentleman, had preferred to omit the term of endearment with which he habitually addressed his mother, whose name was Hélène, from the copies of the letters he showed to Field before Field revealed his true colors. Field, after having consumed, I suppose, many magnifying glasses, gleaned the trace of the “tail or hat” of a Cyrillic t at the edge of the blank space where the salutation had been excised (incidentally, the handwritten lowercase Cyrillic t generally resembles a small Roman m , and is, therefore, tailless and hatless). For that reason, and because the missing word was “about seven letters long,” and also because Father had told him that “Lyolya” was a perfectly normal Russian diminutive for “Hélène,” and God knows for what other reasons, Field concludes (not without a trace of personal outrage), that it was “Lolita, surely,” and, characteristically, proceeds to refer to this absurdity as an established fact further on in his book.

Not only does “Lolita” have only six letters; not only would the Latin derivation have been unthinkable within the parameters of Russian etymology, where Spanish cognates did not enjoy the same favor as French or English ones; but the word deleted out of a sense of privacy and out of respect for the memory of a beloved mother was the Russian “radost ’” (“joy,” “dearest”). It was Nabokov’s habitual salutation to his mother, and, of course, we have the original letters to prove it. And “Lolita Haze” was “Juanita Dark” in Father’s drafts of the novel until very late in the game. So much for “Lolita, surely.”

But let us leave Field among his ruins and revisit another corner of the scrap heap briefly to bury the Agheyev matter, whose relevance here is the dramatic dissimilarity between that author’s work and The Enchanter .

Research by Frank Williams, who originally reviewed the English version of the Agheyev book in the TLS on 5 July 1985; by the French literary journalist Alain Garric who went all the way to Istanbul while preparing a lengthy article on the subject for Libération; and by others, has confirmed the following sequence of events.

After Novel with Cocaine originally appeared in Numbers and aroused a certain curiosity in émigré circles, a Russian lady in Paris named Lydia Chervinskaya was asked to track down “Agheyev” with the help of her parents, who happened to live in Istanbul, whence the manuscript had originally been sent. Chervinskaya found him there, confined to a mental institution because of tremors and convulsions. After being rescued by the lady’s father, Agheyev became a friend of the family and grew close to Chervinskaya, to whom he confided his real name—Mark Levi—and his complex and motley history, which included the killing of a Russian officer, flight to Turkey, and obsession with drugs.

Levi-Agheyev went with Chervinskaya to Paris but, after a sojourn there, returned to Istanbul, where he died, presumably from the consequences of cocaine abuse, in 1936.

V. S. Yanovsky, who was associated with Numbers when the manuscript was first received in Paris, and who now lives in a suburb of New York City, confirmed in an interview reported in The New York Times (8 October 1985) that, when the manuscript arrived for publication in Russian, it bore the unequivocally Jewish signature “Levi,” and that, somewhere along the line, it was decided to substitute “a more Russian-sounding name.” Finally, inquiries by the translator of the French version of the novel that appeared in 1982, cited by Williams, reveal that “a Mark Abramovich Levi was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Istanbul in February 1936.”

While no literary adventurer would have a leg to stand on if he were to question the authorship of The Enchanter , Professor Struve appears determined to persist in his benighted and quixotic campaign to ascribe the Agheyev work, as well, to VN, who, except for a brief contribution on a very different subject to its first issue, submitted no material to Numbers , which had rudely attacked him shortly thereafter; had never visited Moscow, where the novel is set, with a considerable amount of local detail; never used cocaine or other drugs; and wrote, unlike Agheyev, in pure, correct St. Petersburg Russian. Furthermore, if indeed there had been any connection between Nabokov and Novel with Cocaine , someone among his literary acquaintances would have had an inkling of it, and, if not, then his wife, first reader, and typist Vera Nabokov would surely have known.