Word: nechaev
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...