Tijana asked Katherine Addison:

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Katherine Addison I won't say you nailed it *exactly*, but you came pretty damn close. I *was* trying to find a less sanguinary way out of the French Revolution (and, yes, that is one reason I will admit that this book is utopianist, though not a utopia), and in inventing Curnarism I *was* thinking about the late 19th-century Communists and Anarchists. And the rash of Anarchist assassinations. Also, and really even more so, the Chartists

Shulivar himself is not based on anyone in particular, just on trying to imagine what his subject position had to be to believe that what he did was right. He's one of those characters who wrote himself.

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