M. AGEYEV is a pseudonym. Following the publication of Novel with Cocaine in a Paris-based Russian émigré journal in the early 1930s, the author, then living in Istanbul, sent a passport and a short story to a friend in Paris. The short story was published, the passport lost. Nobody has ever identified the author.
MICHAEL HENRY HEIM, winner of the 1998 PEN Center USA West Translation Award for A Bohemian Youth by Josef Hiršal (Northwestern, 1997), is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UCLA. His other translations for Northwestern University Press include Dubravka Ugrešić's Fording the Stream of Consciousness and Felix Roziner's A Certain Finkelmeyer.