The institute says no

The guesthouse in Tbilisi has a radiator that ticks and a window onto a courtyard, and I have spent three days doing reading I could have done in Bishkek, which is what happens when you travel toward a place you are not allowed to enter. The institute in Sukhum has a website. It has a section called history in faces. It has a page about Ivanov.

The page grants him 1926 to 1928, the West Africa expedition of the Academy of Sciences, and a hand in organising the nursery. Then it says the two things I did not expect an institution to say about its own founding legend: that he never worked there, and that there is no evidence for the experiments everybody attributes to the place. That is unusual. A novel of mine leans on that legend, and it leans, I hope, toward the doubt rather than away from it.

There are ways in from the north. Every one of them would make me a criminal under the law of the country I am sitting in, which is a price I am not paying for a corridor and a smell. An institution that corrects the myth about itself deserves to be quoted exactly. I copied the paragraph and left the rest alone.