M. Ageev

M. Agejew ( Russian М. Агеев ; born August 8, 1898 in Moscow , Russian Empire ; † August 5, 1973 in Yerevan , Armenian SSR , Soviet Union ) was the pseudonym of the Russian author Mark Lasarewitsch Levi ( Марк Лазаревич Леви ). He himself used the spelling "Levi", which is also what his German publishers think.

Life

Levi was born into a family of wealthy Jewish fur traders. He attended the Moscow Krayman High School (Гимназия Креймана). In 1916 he took up law studies at Lomonosov University , but dropped out in the third year to take up a post as transport inspector in the new Bolshevik administration. During the Russian Civil War he was assigned to a staff of the Red Army and was wounded in one battle. From 1923 onwards he worked as a translator for the state trading agency Arkos. In 1924 he moved to the German Reich as a Soviet citizen , on the official justification of learning the furrier trade. He found a job at the Leipzig fur company Eitingon . At the same time he graduated from the philological faculty of Leipzig University . He also worked as a Russian teacher at the Berlitz language school .

In 1931 he moved to Paris, where he continued to work for Berlitz. In the mid-1930s he lived in Istanbul , where he worked for the French publisher Hachette . In 1939 he applied to the Soviet embassy in Turkey to return to the Soviet Union, but it was rejected.

In 1942 Levi was deported across the Soviet border by the Turkish authorities as " persona non grata ". He was suspected of working for the Soviet secret service NKVD and of being involved in a failed assassination attempt on the German ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen .

Levi, however, did not receive a residence permit for his hometown Moscow, but for Yerevan , the capital of the Armenian Soviet Republic . He found a job as a lecturer in German studies at the state university there . Neither his family members nor his colleagues learned of the literary works he wrote while emigrating. Yerevan remained his residence until his death.

Works

Under the pseudonym “M. Agejew ”, Levi published two literary works, both published in Paris in 1934:

• The " novel with cocaine " ( Роман с кокаином ) initially appeared in 17 episodes in the weekly magazine "Illjustrirowannaja shisn" (Illustrated Life), 1-17.1934. The book edition followed in 1936 in a small edition of 400 copies, which was reissued in 1983. The French edition became a bestseller and the novel was translated into several dozen languages.

• The story “Ein louses Volk” ( Паршивый народ ) in the magazine “Wstretschi” (Encounters) 4.1934: In a court hearing in Moscow in 1924, the leader of a Ukrainian gang of thieves, who also participated in pogroms against the Jews , is sentenced to death by shooting. A Jewish observer at the trial expressed pity for the convicted man, whereupon an old man in the audience said that the Jews were “a lousy people”: They showed pity even though they should feel hatred for the convicted man who murdered Jewish women and children.

Decryption of the pseudonym

After the novel was published in 1934, the Russian émigré press speculated about the author, who was hiding behind the pseudonym M. Agejew. The publisher gave no information on this. Only when the book became an international bestseller half a century later did the Paris-based Russian writer Lidija Tscherwinskaja (1907–1988) announce that it was about Mark Levi, that she had met him in Istanbul and that she had been his lover. He later returned to the Soviet Union. However, their report was rated as not very credible. The fact that the exiled writer Wassili Janowski , who had edited Levi's manuscript in Paris at the time, had previously represented this version in his memoirs also went largely unnoticed .

In 1985 the Parisian Slavist Nikita Struve, son of a well-known literary critic of Russian emigration, published an essay in which he identified Vladimir Nabokov as the true author of the "Novel with Cocaine" based on examples of content and style . Nabokov's widow Vera rejected this thesis. The Swiss literary scholar Felix Philipp Ingold took the version that Nabokov and Levi had written the book together.

The riddle was solved in 1994 by archivists Marina Sorokina and Gabriel Superfin: They found files from the Krayman High School in Moscow's city archives, including those from the 1916 high school graduation class. This included a Mark Levi, and several pupils and teachers also had names that reflect the names of protagonists looked very much like the novel. They discovered Levi's files in the archives of Lomossov University. It contained a request from the University of Yerevan from 1952 about his studies. Following Lidija Tscherwinskaja's remark, which was originally not taken seriously by historians, that Levi had lived in Turkey, from where he had returned to the Soviet Union, the archivists found what they were looking for in the files of the Foreign Ministry in Moscow: They contained Levi's applications to the Soviet embassy in Ankara and reports on the investigation by the Turkish authorities into the attack on Ambassador von Papen also include a résumé. In it Levi described himself as the author of the "novel with cocaine", underlining that the content was not directed "against the Soviet power".

Since this publication, literary studies have considered the case to be resolved. Ingold, however, sticks to the idea that the novel Agejews could be a co-production between Levi and Nabokov.

literature

• Thomas Urban : Vladimir Nabokov - Blue Evenings in Berlin . Berlin 1999, pp. 159-184.

Web links

• Literature by and about M. Agejew in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Literature by and about M. Agejew in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information, unless otherwise stated, based on: Thomas Urban: Vladimir Nabokov - Blue Evenings in Berlin. Berlin 1999, pp. 159-184.
2. ^ Russian literary dictionary livelib.ru
3. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel November 18, 2012.
4. ^ Russian literary dictionary livelib.ru
5. ^ "Parshivy narod" text edition in: Lib.ru
6. ↑ cf. [1] hrono.ru
7. ↑ Liberation, December 26, 1985, pp. 21-24.
8. ↑ Vasilij Janovskij: Pol'ja Elisejskie. New York 1983, p. 236.
9. ↑ Vestnik Russko-Christianskogo Dviženija, 146 (1986), S. 179th
10. ↑ Der Spiegel , May 12, 1986.
11. ^ Die Zeit , August 15, 1986, p. 35.
12. ↑ Minuvšee. Istoričeskij al'manach [Moscow / St.Petersburg], 16 (1994), pp. 265-288.
13. ↑ The Nabokovian [Lawrende / Kansas], 38 (1997), pp. 52-54.
14. ^ Felix Philipp Ingold: An enigmatic masterpiece. With the "Novel with Cocaine", Mark Levi alias M. Agejew created something breathtaking - but did he really do it alone? NZZ , November 24, 2012, p. 24