Word: isaev
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...Coetzee's darkly convincing narration, Dostoyevsky hears that his 21- year-old stepson Pavel Isaev, who has fallen in with nihilists in Petersburg, has been murdered, perhaps by the police or by his comrades. The writer travels to Petersburg, finds the rooming house where Pavel had lived and -- guilt-haunted because he did not get along well with this difficult son of his dead first wife -- moodily retraces the young man's last months. He tries to retrieve Pavel's papers from the police and is subjected to repeated, insinuating interrogations. He encounters a deadly, contemptuous young nihilist named Nechaev...
...town to which Dostoevsky was sent as an army private after his release from prison. Soon the smitten 33-year-old soldier and the sensitive lady were holding hands and crying into each other's sweet tea while hubby sprawled in a drunken stupor on the divan. After Isaev died, they were married. But Maria was frigid, and Dostoevsky was soon complaining: "We're living so-so . . . The heart will wither. I am quite alone...
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