Word: nechaev
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...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, who seems to live from child prostitution and who may have been Pavel's killer. Later, back in Pavel's rooming house, where he is staying, sleeping in Pavel's bed, wearing his stepson's unwashed clothes, Dostoyevsky begins to sketch the character who will be Nikolai Stavrogin, the world...
...travel to Petersburg in 1869; he remained in Dresden. His stepson Pavel was not murdered by nihilists or anyone else. A pest and a spendthrift, he tormented the author all his life, and a standard scene from biographies has Pavel being forcibly kept from Dostoyevsky's deathbed. Nechaev did exist, and Dostoyevsky did transform him into a character in Demons, but the student his gang murdered in a celebrated crime was one Ivan Ivanov. Coetzee could hardly help knowing this, but not a word of preface or footnote explains that historical truth has been meddled with...
Young Vladimir was deeply influenced by the Russian revolutionary tradition stemming from the anarchists, by the peasant-dreamer Tkachev, and by the demonic intriguer Nechaev. Vladimir accepted without qualification Nechaev's famous dictum: "Everything that promotes the success of the revolution is moral; everything that hinders it is immoral...
...UNMENTIONABLE NECHAEV, by Michael Prawdin. The story of the youthful fanatic who became the model for the nihilist Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's classic study of the ethics and psychology of revolutionaries, The Possessed, and who devised the bleak, dehumanized code of conspiracy and terror that became the model for Lenin's Bolsheviks...
...UNMENTIONABLE NECHAEV, by Michael Prawdin. The story of the youthful fanatic who became the model for the nihilist Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's classic study of the ethics and psychology of revolutionaries, The Possessed, and who devised the bleak, dehumanized code of conspiracy and terror that became the model for Lenin's Bolsheviks...