The Master of Petersburg - Hardcover

Coetzee, J. M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670855871 ISBN 13: 9780670855872

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1994

Synopsis

Returning to St. Petersburg after the death of his stepson, Dostoyevsky battles grief, epilepsy, an obsession with his stepson's landlady, and eventually a demonic conspiracy in order to get to the cause of the young man's death. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author

J. M. Coetzee is a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town.

Reviews

Writing from inside the head of another writer is always a hazardous undertaking; when the subject is Fyodor Dostoyevski, the audacity is breathtaking. But that is what Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians; The Life & Times of Michael K) dares here, succeeding beyond all expectation. His Dostoyevski, after serving his sentence in Siberia, is living in self-imposed exile in Germany when his much-cherished stepson Pavel is found dead on a quay in St. Petersburg. The novelist rushes back there, full of anguish and guilt, and finds himself drawn instantly into an intense, edgy affair with the boy's landlady and into a wary intimacy with her young daughter, who had befriended Pavel. As a former revolutionary, he also becomes the object of police attention, particularly as one of Pavel's close associates was Nechaev, the very model of a ruthless Bolshevik. The epileptic Dostoyevski is in deepest turmoil as he mourns his stepson, tries to learn how he died (Was he killed by the police? Slain by the revolutionaries as a provocation? A suicide?) and alternately yields to and resists his darkest erotic self. The world Coetzee conjures with burning intensity is the one we remember from Karamazov and The Possessed, and there are long, searching conversations, with a police inspector and with the remorseless Nechaev himself, that could have been penned by the Russian master. It's a harrowing, exhilarating performance sure to further lift Coetzee's lofty reputation.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Depending on how readers take to literary conceits, Coetzee's new novel will be received as either a flash of fierce lightning or a rumble of unthreatening thunder. Coetzee (Age of Iron, 1990, etc.) nimbly plucks his premise from a fact--usually treated as incidental--of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life. The Russian novelist had a wastrel stepson, Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev, whom Coetzee imagines died in 1869 (he didn't). Suffering an affliction beyond grief, Fyodor travels to St. Petersburg and takes the room his son last occupied. It's in the home of the dour Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina, the mother of quick-tongued Matryona. His intention is to reconcile himself to his loss by getting to the bottom of it. What he doesn't count on is learning that what he'd been told was a suicide may have been a murder. Among Pavel's papers, which are in the hands of officials, is a list of people to be assassinated. Pavel was possibly marked for death as part of People's Vengeance, a revolutionary group headed by the opportunistic Sergei Gennadevich Nechaev. As various Dostoevskian themes wink from the lines (the ruthlessness of oppressors, father-son rivalry, the nature of death, madness), the disoriented Fyodor finds himself enamored of Anna as well as caught in Sergei's subversive activities. Eventually, Fyodor is entangled in additional deaths--one on each side of the law--and as the novel reaches its denouement, he suffers a major disillusionment. Handed his stepson's papers, he learns that he loomed as a heavy in the boy's life. He also discovers that Pavel had scribbled crude short stories that could be remade into works of Dostoevskian art. What Coetzee is getting at is not news: Writers mine material from the complexities of their lives and, if necessary, step on toes, ``sell everyone,'' endure ``a life without honor.'' Boldly presumptuous, yet somehow precious. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

St. Petersburg is poised for revolution as Fyodor Dostoevsky returns from Germany to claim his deceased stepson's papers. Although the police rule Pavel's death a suicide, the famous writer is drawn into a group of shady characters, including the anarchist Nechaev, who is possibly Pavel's killer. Plagued by seizures and tormented by a torrid affair with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky struggles to ascertain once and for all a writer's responsibility to his family and society. The strength of South African writer Coetzee (Age of Iron, LJ 8/90) lies in his ability to draw characters and scenes evoking the dark mood of the master's novels. Unfortunately, this story of action and ideas lapses into monotonous debate in its final chapters, but there is much to enjoy despite the flagging plot. Recommended for literary collections.
Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Here is an imagined glimpse into the mind of Fyodor Dostoevsky, poised between his completion of Crime and Punishment and creation of his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. South African writer Coetzee gains entry to the Russian's soul by weighing down his thoughts on settling the affairs of stepson Pavel, who fell to death from St. Petersburg's shot tower. While collecting Pavel's meager possessions--a symbolic white suit, diaries and letters--Dostoevsky strains to define his relationship with Pavel, and these strains Coetzee skillfully translates into a picture of fevered, psychological confusion, even panic at times. In part, this stems from the discovery of Pavel's involvement with the "People's Vengeance" (modeled on the historical People's Will, the Russian revolutionary terrorists of the 1870s). Structurally, the plot produces the effects of confusion and disturbance via Dostoevsky's dialogues with the terrorists' leader, who had recruited Pavel to the cause. In due course, another suspicious death occurs and the parricide theme (central to The Brothers K) germinates in the writer's mind from reading his stepson's stories. A complicated evocation of a great writer's inner stresses, this interior novel pays dividends for readers attuned to the times it evokes and the great writer it examines. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670855871
• ISBN 13: 9780670855872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256