THE TALK OF MOSCOW; CHERNOBYL FALLOUT: APOCALYPTIC TALE AND FEAR (Published 1986)
A prominent Russian writer recently produced a tattered old Bible and with a practiced hand turned to Revelations. ''Listen,'' he said, ''this is incredible: 'And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.' ''
In a dictionary, he showed the Ukrainian word for wormwood, a bitter wild herb used as a tonic in rural Russia: chernobyl.
