Saturday, June 22, 2013

Dostoyevsky's Pavel Pavlovich: The Eternal Ephebophile



I wrote on my writer's blog about what the award winning non-fiction writer Rich Cohen wrote in a Vanity Fair article about his effort to ghost write a book about Theodore Forstmann.

Cohen wrote: "Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once your're in, you're in."

And I mentioned in The Allure of Nymphets that once I started writing the book, I was inundated with examples of age-discrepant relationships - often by serendipity. I'm still finding examples, almost on a daily basis, which is why I'm going to include at least 50 new pages in the second edition.

One such occurrence took place recently while I was in Brooklyn attending a gathering for a newly retired colleague. I decided to give him a copy of The Allure of Nymphets as a retirement present. (By the way, someone at the gathering called my book "dirty".) While we were discussing the book, I told him that I could literally feel and sense when some media would have an age-discrepant theme.

Consequently, after a sneaked away from the gathering, I continued reading Dostoyevsky's The Eternal Husband on the subway, and to my amazement, the novella contained Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky, a middle-aged man who aspired to marry 15-year-old Nadia.

This is how the 49-years-old described the nymphet Nadia:

Nadia was better than all her sisters - a small brunette with the air of a wild thing and the boldness of a nihilist; a thievish little demon with fiery eyes, a lovely, though often wicked, smile, amazing lips and teeth, slim, slender, with a nascent thought in the ardent expression of her face, at the same time still quite childish. Her fifteen years spoke in her every step, every word. It turned out later that Pavel Pavlovich had actually seen her for the first time with an oilcloth book bag in her hand, but now she no longer carried it.

However, Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky made a seduction faux pas, which reduced his chances of marrying Nadia.

Lastly, the age-of-consent in Russia was lowered to 14 in 1988, but returned to 16 in 2003. 



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