Word: markov
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Dates: during 1984-1984
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...TRUTH THAT KILLED by Georgi Markov Translated by Liliana Brisby Ticknor & Fields; 280 pages...
...crossed London's Waterloo Bridge one September afternoon in 1978, a middle-aged foreigner was jostled by a man with an umbrella. The encounter looked as harmless as the weather; in fact, it was to recall the more lurid adventures of 007. For the foreigner was Bulgarian Georgi Markov, the stranger was a hired assassin, and the umbrella tip held a pellet loaded with ricin, a deadly poison. The notorious "umbrella murder" occurred because of the information contained in this chilling memoir, written after the author's defection...
...Markov had been his country's leading novelist and playwright; he had also served a term during the Stalin years, in the Bulgarian Gulag. His prison experiences and literary skills combined to produce the scabrous picture of a nation enslaved. Yet in the eyes of the Bulgarian leadership that was not Markov's worst crime against the state. On Radio Free Europe the defector offered a description of Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov, a smiling brute on the order of Nikita Khrushchev. At a banquet the author catches the official acting like a Balkan Queen of Hearts, shouting...