Word: pavel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...Coetzee sums things up. But there are some facts the typical reader may not know that he ought to: in real life Dostoyevsky did not 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...
...banks, hoping to cripple the criminal gangs. In the meantime, citizens are afraid to go out at night; stores have difficulty keeping pistols, Mace and bulletproof jackets in stock; dinner conversations stop abruptly whenever a tail pipe backfires in the streets. "The crime problem today knows no limits," says Pavel Gusev, editor in chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets, who travels with a bodyguard. "In the U.S. your Mafia has already divided up spheres of business, so the bosses no longer kill each other off. Here we have a wild market where state holdings are being turned over into private hands...
...hands, planned at least one more, speaks with repellent offhandedness about still other assassinations. He is capable of warmth, though -- for his old boss, Lavrenti Beria, and for Beria's boss, Joseph Stalin; he still admires both even while acknowledging their "criminal activities." None of which by itself discredits Pavel Sudoplatov's sensational tales of Soviet espionage; in fact his closeness to Beria, Stalin's last secret-police chief (1938-53), whom he served as a spy master, put him in a position to know. But Sudoplatov's most stunning charge -- that world-renowned physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi...
Four weeks ago, we printed an excerpt from Special Tasks, the memoir of a Soviet spymaster published by Little, Brown. In it the principal author, Pavel Sudoplatov, charged that prominent scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, had knowingly made atomic secrets available to Soviet agents. Since publication of the book, many nuclear physicists and historians have raised serious questions about Sudoplatov's account. Our story on the controversy begins on page...