The debutant is such a sophisticated poison because it leaves no trace.
After its molecules have destroyed the body, they literally dissolve into thin air, and what the defected KGB officer Wyrin initially thinks is a wasp sting in the neck ultimately brings him to death.
The attack is taking place on the territory of a Western European country, so the government is launching investigations and bringing in experts. So the chemist Kalitin suddenly becomes a danger to the masterminds: In Soviet times he developed the so-called debutante and now also lives in the West. So two KGB agents set out to eliminate him too.
But back to the opening scene with the supposed wasp sting, which runs like a short film in front of the inner eye, so vividly is the summery atmosphere captured shortly before the attack, then the paranoia that sets in: “The perfect poison” is full of such strong images, catchy ideas . A rebellious priest whom the secret service tries to wear down with sheer abundance: First there are twenty unordered cakes in front of his door, then mountains of clutter, and in the end live animals. Soldiers go hunting for monkeys that have escaped from a top-secret research facility.
Or the chemist Kalitin, who secretly tried on his mother's new dressing gown as a young boy, or his uncle's highly decorated uniform. Then later, on his first day in the laboratory, the heavy protective rubber suit in which he does not recognize himself. Kalitin goes through these transformations each time like initiation rites, becoming another, partly from something larger than life. Such flashbacks usually help to better understand the characters, but here they make them more impenetrable, making Kalitin, like his debutants, the prototype of a state apparatus that literally buries its people page by page, folder by folder, under written memories.
Wyrin calls the files that the KGB creates about every potential enemy and traitor, "paranoid novels" that reassemble their subject from denunciations, eavesdropped and spied upon. In a certain way, “The Perfect Poison” is a ghost story in which these living shadows, these paper-based files become independent, in which every idealism sooner or later evaporates as without a trace as the debutant.
The novels of the journalist and writer Sergej Lebedew, who now lives in Berlin, have a hard time finding publishers in his Russian homeland. They explore the country's repressed past and draw lines from Stalin's rule to Putin. The way Lebedev is able to pile up contemporary history layer by layer until one recognizes the real existing models, even though concrete place names are seldom mentioned, one can also guess that he originally studied geology.