Cocaine
Related: drugs - Sigmund Freud (famous user)
Way in my brain, no cocaine I don't wanna, I don't wanna go insane. --Under Mi Sleng Teng (1995) - Wayne Smith
Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife () - John Singer Sargent
Robert Louis Stevenson was another great discovery for me - the notion that the story of Jekyll and Hyde had emerged from a cocaine binge makes so much sense of the story itself, as well as serving as a great example of the subtle ways in which an illicit drug like cocaine has found its way into mainstream culture. -- Sadie Plant via http://www.absolutewrite.com/novels/sadie_plant.htm [Jul 2005]
Freud
The basic tenet proposed by J. V. Scheidt states that the narcotic drug, cocaine played a role in the development of psychoanalysis which has been underestimated up to the present day. It is a fact that Freud himself took cocaine (in small doses) for about two years, and that he began his dream interpretation approximately ten years later. Scheidt believes that a long, unconscious conflict related to the cocaine-induced states of euphoria (ten years later) suddenly led to the beginnings of dream interpretation. The question to be answered now is: Why did this happen precisely in 1895? The foundations of psychoanalysis had already been laid, the application of the new method to the treatment of nervous disorders (heart complaints, train phobias, etc.) was certainly obvious. During this self-analysis it became necessary, first of all, to come to terms with the self-reproaches-which lay on the surface and were more accessible to consciousness-related to Freud's cocaine period (Fleischl-Marxow becomes addicted to cocaine, the most terrible night ever experienced, death of this friend, Freud's warning came too late). It was only when Freud has come to terms with this phase of his life that the road to the deepest part, the discovery of the Oedipus complex in the fall of 1897, was cleared. --http://cocaine.org/history/sigmundfreud.html [Mar 2006]The Cocain Romance (1934) - M. Ageyev
The Cocain Romance, or Novel With Cocaine (Roman s kokainom), is a mysterious Russian novel first published in 1934 in a Parisian émigré publication, Numbers, and subtitled "Confessions of a Russian opium-eater". Its author was given as M. Ageyev.
The Cocain Romance is said to be a Dostoevskyan psychological novel of ideas, which explores the interaction between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its frank portrayal of an adolescent's cocaine addiction. The story relates the formative experiences of narrator Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the novel's obsession with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name."
Following its original publication in Numbers, the novel was published in book form; it was scorned as decadent and disgusting, to use the term applied to it by Vladimir Nabokov. In 1983 the novel was translated into French and published to nearly unanimous praise; an English translation (by Michael Henry Heim) was published in 1984. After the French translation was published, there was some brief speculation in literary circles as to whether Novel with Cocaine might actually be the work of Nabokov, perhaps one of his mystifications; the consensus is that Nabokov was not the author. Nabokov's son Dmitri addresses this issue in an afterword to his 1986 English translation of VN's novel The Enchanter.
Today, Novel With Cocaine counts John Updike and Will Self among its admirers and is said to have laid the path for William S. Burroughs to pen similar examinations of junky excess. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel_With_Cocaine [Aug 2006]
See also: 1934 - drugs in literature
Cocaine (1921) - Pitigrilli
In search of banned books
Cocaine (1921) - Pitigrilli [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Pitigrilli (pseudonym for Dino Serge), born in Turin May 9, 1893, died in 1975) was an Italian writer. Cocaïne (1921) is his most famous novel. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitigrilli [Jun 2006]
Inspired by:
C.J. Aarts & Mizzi van der Pluijm, Verboden boeken. Verboden door pausen en dictators, puriteinen en boekenhaters, De Bijenkorf, Amsterdam, 1989
See also: literature censorship - psychotropes in literature - cocaine - Italian literature - 1921
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