M. Ageyev is a pseudonym. Following the publication of
Novel with Cocaine in a Paris-based Russian emigre 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 Hirsal
(Northwestern, 1997), is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UCLA. His other translations for Northwestern University Press include Dubravka Ugresic's Fording the Stream of Consciousness and Felix Roziner's A Certain Finkelmeyer.