Rewriting Dostoevsky: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and the perverted truths of biographical fiction

The Master of Petersburg: A conventional literary biography?

At first sight, The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee’s first post-apartheid novel, could almost be mistaken for a traditional literary biography. Published in 1994, this work by the renowned South African (now Australian) writer ¹ indeed gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of Russian literature, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881), many aspects of whose life are alluded to in the text. These include: Dostoevsky’s complicated relationship with his father Mikhail, the circumstances of whose death (when his son was 17) were never fully elucidated; the author’s epileptic fits and tortured personality; his propensity for gambling (resulting in endless debts and constant financial difficulties); his ten-year exile (starting in 1849) in Siberia, where he was sent — together with other members of the so-called Petrashevsky Circle — after being arrested by the Tsarists for his revolutionary activities and narrowly avoiding execution; his subsequent exile in Dresden, where he chose to take refuge in order to escape his Russian creditors; his successive marital relationships with Maria Dimitrievna Isaeva and Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina; or his stepson Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev’s resentment towards the writer’s second marriage to a younger woman (Anna Snitkina) after the death of his own mother (Maria Isaeva). Elements or individuals characterizing the historical background, namely Russia in the late 1860s, are also recognizable. For example, Sergei Gennadevich Nechaev, a radical activist and the leader of a revolutionary group named the People’s Vengeance, features prominently in the narrative. More specifically, the plot unfolds in October and November 1869, in the couple of months preceding the composition of The Possessed (1962/1871). This novel, alternatively translated as The Devils (1992/1871) or Demons (1994/1871), was published in 1871–1872 in serialized form and is generally regarded — next to Crime and Punishment (2014/1866), The Idiot (2003/1868), and The Brothers Karamazov (2004/1880) — as one of Dostoevsky’s four post-Siberia masterpieces. The Possessed is based on a historical murder in which Nechaev and some of his nihilist supporters were notoriously involved on 26 November 1869: that of Ivan Ivanov (called Ivan Shatov in the novel), a radicalized student and fellow member of the Nechaev group, with which he had become disillusioned.

Because of these numerous factual references, some scholars, such as Derek Attridge (2004: 117), have observed that “the reader is […] invited to treat The Master of Petersburg as an interpretation of the historical Dostoevsky’s life and work”. However, far from merely examining the historical circumstances in which The Possessed was composed, Coetzee’s novel fictionalizes the very making of Dostoevsky’s text. This has generated a degree of critical puzzlement, not to say frustration, for instance on the part of Dostoevsky’s biographer Joseph Frank. While Frank has acknowledged “Coetzee’s right to fictionalize” (Attwell, 2016/2015: 165), he also deplored that the author “did not include a warning to his readers […] not to take fiction as fact” (Frank, 2010/1999: 198; see also Attwell, 2016/2015: 165), insofar as many of them will not be acquainted with Dostoevsky’s detailed biography.

In The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee indeed departs from biographical fact in several important regards. Dominic Head (2009: 73), for example, has noted that while Coetzee “does rely on actual events and historical figures”, he “is not entirely faithful to his biographical sources” in the novel. Although Coetzee has Dostoevsky return to Russia in 1869, the latter does not appear to have done so until 1871. Even more crucially, as opposed to Coetzee’s fictional suggestion, the Russian writer never travelled from Dresden to St Petersburg (under the false name of Isaev; see 2004/1994: 29) in the wake of his stepson Pavel’s death since he was survived by the latter, who only passed away in 1900 (namely 19 years after his stepfather). Pavel’s mortal fall from an equally imaginary shot tower (Attwell, 2016/2015: 163; a place where the no less invented confrontation with Nechaev occurs) constitutes “the most consequential of Coetzee’s alterations” (Attwell, 2016/2015: 165). Moreover, the fact that “the basic premise on which [his] work is built” is so “glaringly contrafactual” (Attridge, 2004: 118) rules out any attempt to interpret the novel as a statement on a real author and his work.

The nagging question raised by The Master of Petersburg nevertheless remains: why does Coetzee choose to break away from Dostoevsky’s biography in this way? As a matter of fact, Coetzee takes a number of liberties (see Attwell, 2016/2015: 165) not only with the historical record, but also with Dostoevsky’s fiction. As he does so, he seeks to engage with both Dostoevsky the man and Dostoevsky the author, opening up a dialogue with the Russian writer’s life and work. Crucially, this dialogical approach prompts Coetzee to reimagine Dostoevsky as the protagonist in a rewriting of his own novel The Possessed. In this context, The Master of Petersburg, whose literary confrontation with the Russian master yields an extended reflection on the notions of authorship, biological as well as literary filiation, and fiction (not least on the part played by fiction in a process of mourning), can also be read both as a critique of censorship (as suggested by Coetzee’s reworking of a censored section of The Possessed into the closing chapter of his novel) and, more broadly, as a meditation on writing (auto/biographical writing in particular) conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public. We will see that, intimate though it may be, the act of writing is likely to involve a betrayal of privacy, as underscored by numerous commentators including David Attwell, Franklyn A. Hyde, Michelle Kelly, María J. López, and Mike Marais. This essay will also show that this necessary perversion of auto/biography aims to achieve allegedly superior forms of truth — be they personal or cultural — through imaginative literature. This is because the various displacements implicit in biographical fiction (and caused, in this case, by an engagement with the biographee’s life and work) allow Coetzee both to explore the experience of mourning and to set forth conceptions of history and literature in ways that may not have been made possible by less oblique types of writing.

Towards auto/biographical fiction and its perversions

Several Coetzeean critics, such as Attridge (2004: 124), have contended that the fictional Dostoevsky’s “mourning — for a stepson with whom he had a troubled relationship — seem[ed] excessive” and that a fuller understanding of this phenomenon could hardly be gained if Coetzee’s own biography was not taken into account. Indeed, Coetzee lost his son Nicolas in April 1989: the latter (aged almost 23 at the time), died — much like Coetzee’s Pavel — after falling from the balcony of his apartment. In this light, The Master of Petersburg, which the author began to write less than two years after this tragic event, inevitably emerges as an effort on Coetzee’s part to come to terms — much like his Dostoevsky — with the premature loss of his son by superimposing his grief on his older male character’s. As David Attwell (2016/2015: 170) has argued in his recent J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time, which explores Coetzee’s archives housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Coetzee’s gesture in The Master of Petersburg consists in suggesting that a period of “disorienting grief” was at the core of the creative process that brought Dostoevsky to write The Possessed. Attwell further asserts that the “empathic leap” Coetzee takes in this particular case has to do with “reimagining his own grief as Dostoevsky’s” (2016/2015: 170), labelling the genre “autobiographical historical fiction” (2016/2015: 174). Coetzee’s project, like his Dostoevsky’s, is also an attempt at reconstructing, and reflecting on, his relationship with his son, which had become strained as a result of Nicolas’s insubordinate nature. In Coetzee’s own words, his novel aims “to recover the truth of his relation to the dead boy” (Attwell, 2016/2015: 173) by resurrecting him as Stavrogin (see Attwell, 2016/2015: 168, 175). At this juncture, it is worth noting that before shifting to Pavel in later versions of the novel, Nikolai was the name borne by the younger male character — one that unambiguously echoes that of Coetzee’s son on the one hand and of Dostoevsky’s protagonist on the other. As the real soul of the revolutionary group officially led by Pyotr Verkhovensky (whom Dostoevsky modelled on Sergei Nechaev), Nikolai Stavrogin is a fascinatingly dark figure who exerts his deleterious influence on all those who surround him. In The Possessed, he confesses his worst crimes — the rape of his landlady’s 11-year-old daughter, the subsequent suicide of whom he witnesses without lifting a finger to prevent it — to Monk Tikhon in a chapter (aptly titled “at Tikhon’s” or “Stavrogin’s confession”) that was deemed too shocking for publication (see Hyde, 2011: 223) by Dostoevsky’s publisher. The book section was accordingly censored for the next 50 years (until 1922), despite the fact that full entry into Stavrogin’s psyche cannot be achieved without reading it.

In The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is, at first, completely overwhelmed by a sense of guilt deriving from his failure as a father, namely by the painful realization of his inability to protect his son not only from his actual death, but also from the latter’s knowledge of his own imminent passing. This is exemplified by the following passage, a particularly interesting one in terms of narrative strategy insofar as it establishes a relationship of identity between biographer and focalizer, which Dorrit Cohn identifies as a distinctive narratological feature of fictional — as opposed to conventional — biography (see Cohn, qtd. in Keener, 2017/2001: 334–37):

What he cannot bear is the thought that, for the last fraction of the last instant of his fall, Pavel knew that nothing could save him, that he was dead. He wants to believe Pavel was protected from that certainty, more terrible than annihilation itself, by the hurry and confusion of the fall, by the mind’s way of etherizing itself against whatever is too enormous to be borne. With all his heart he wants to believe this. At the same time he knows that he wants to believe in order to etherize himself against the knowledge that Pavel, falling, knew everything. (Coetzee, 2004/1994: 20–21) ²

At that time, the fictional Dostoevsky suffers, interestingly, from a persistent writer’s block (18), which he is unable to overcome. It is only when he recognizes Pavel’s closeness to the Nechaev group and thus his son’s involvement, if only moral, in the crimes they have committed — in other words when he finally accepts his son’s loss of innocence and the latter’s symbolic association with Stavrogin — that Dostoevsky succeeds in coming to grips with his sense of guilt and to write his son back into existence. The historical Dostoevsky’s “ongoing critique of Nihilism” as “an evil spirit” (Coetzee, 2001: 141–42) originates in his Siberian exile, which largely contributed to reforming his political views, more specifically to “sh[aking] his faith in Socialism” (Coetzee, 2001: 138). Upon his return, the young activist he once was — “a one-time subversive”, in Coetzee’s own terms (2001: 143) — had transmuted into a profoundly Christian and “patriotic Russian” (35). Coetzee’s Dostoevsky similarly “reject[s] everything [Nechaev] stands for”, namely “the violent overthrow of all the institutions of society” (35). To him, the Nechaevites are clearly “under possession” (44): their nihilist ideas, which can only lead to self-destruction (60–61), are like “demons” they are “possessed by” (44), and he is forced to admit that his stepson “ha[s] fallen under the[ir] influence” (42). Pavel’s “death of innocence” (213) as a consequence of his revolutionary sympathies — in Dostoevsky’s eyes — is made clear by the following passage, as is his stepfather’s anger:

Is he going to have to give up his last faith in Pavel’s innocence and acknowledge him in truth as Nechaev’s comrade and follower, a restless young man who responded without reserve to all that Nechaev offered: not just the adventure of conspiracy but the soul-inflating ecstasies of death-dealing too? As Nechaev hates the fathers and makes implacable war on them, so must Pavel be allowed to follow him? (238–39)

While we may have been tempted to associate Pavel with Ivan Ivanov (Ivan Shatov in The Possessed), an unquestionable victim of a group he was once close to, Coetzee encourages us to rule out this possibility by attaching this name, in the narrative, to a police spy (123) who was assassinated by the Nechaevites, thereby compelling us to identify Pavel with a more obvious accomplice of Nechaev/Verkhovensky, namely Stavrogin. Of course, Pavel’s political affinities do not prevent his stepfather from wanting, at all costs, “his son returned to life” (52). However, the (step)father’s quest for truth, which results in the (step)son’s perilous identification with Stavrogin, necessarily implies a form of literary betrayal, which can be seen as a response to the fact that Dostoevsky himself felt “betrayed” (60), in Coetzee’s novel at least, by Pavel’s connection to the Nechaevites. This compulsion to “write perversions of the truth” (236), namely to transcend experience (particularly when it is traumatic) and to transform it into texture, is explicitly stated in this excerpt, where Dostoevsky

unpacks the writing-case, sets out his materials. No longer a matter of listening for the lost child calling from the dark stream, no longer a matter of being faithful to Pavel when all have given him up. Not a matter of fidelity at all. On the contrary, a matter of betrayal — betrayal of love first of all, and then of Pavel and the mother and child and everyone else. Perversion: everything and everyone to be turned to another use, to be gripped to him and fall with him. (235; emphasis in original)

At some point, Anna Sergeyevna, Pavel’s landlady with whom Dostoevsky starts an affair soon after his arrival in Petersburg in the hope that this bereaved mother (she also lost a young son) will conduct him to Pavel, perceptively reminds him that “as an artist, a master”, he has the power “to bring [his son] back to life” (140) through fictional means. Yet, as the previously quoted extract shows, Dostoevsky can only resurrect him as an “imperfect angel” (220), thereby symbolically killing the idealized child to whose image he still clung and “writing his son into immortality” (Coetzee, qtd. in Attwell, 2016/2015: 167) as a (now) figuratively fallen figure. As Franklyn A. Hyde (2011: 224) convincingly explains, the “betrayal” we are concerned with here “is Dostoevsky’s perversion of turning Pavel into the character of the enigmatic aristocratic sociopath Stavrogin, a final admission of the proximity of his stepson to the revolutionary movement”. Along the same lines, Attwell (2016/2015: 181) maintains that Pavel’s transformation into “the morally malevolent force that will dominate Dostoevsky’s great work, remaining immortalized there for as long as it is read”, namely “the diabolical Stavrogin” (2016/2015: 180–81), is evidence that the former has been betrayed.

Concretely, this betrayal takes the shape of a textual falsification: that of Pavel’s diary, in which the fictional Dostoevsky drafts, in the final chapter of Coetzee’s own novel (titled “Stavrogin”), two sketches of what later becomes the censored chapter of The Possessed, at the risk of allowing potential readers (including Anna Sergeyevna and her young daughter Matryona) to read this fake confession (Stavrogin’s) as Pavel’s and thus to mistake Pavel as “a figure of peculiar evil […] who destroys others without any strong motivation or evident satisfaction” (Attridge, 2004: 126). Even those of Coetzee’s commentators who were most familiar with his work (such as Attridge) have conceded that they had been deeply disturbed by this conception of writing as “treachery” (Attridge, 2004: 222; see also 129), “one that abandons the commitment to the ethical” (2004: 128) and renders “apparent that what is required for writing, for literature, to begin is the sacrifice of […] innocence” (2004: 132). In this respect, Coetzee’s novel ends on a particularly dark note. Indeed, these betrayals predicated on a perception of “literary writing not as a reflection of truth, of factual reality, but as a perversion or distortion of it” (López, 2011: 270) come at a price for writers who choose to trespass conventional moral boundaries (see also López, 2011: 252, 264–65). In The Master of Petersburg, Pavel’s death predictably shatters Dostoevsky’s identity, making “the word I […] as enigmatic as a rock in the middle of a desert” (71; emphasis in original). Dostoevsky’s awareness of his inner condition is heightened by Anna Sergeyevna’s meaningful words, which return to him: “You are in mourning for yourself” (237; emphasis in original). When he overcomes his writer’s block and starts writing again in the closing chapter of Coetzee’s novel, Dostoevsky does not seek to reconstruct a solid self but further gestures, instead, towards selflessness or perhaps towards a kind of subjectivity that would merge with his main character Pavel/Stavrogin’s (“I am he”, he had said earlier on — 76). As he betrays even his closest relatives, abusing their privacy (leaving “nothing […] secret”) and distorting their life-stories (telling “nothing […] truthfully” — Attridge, 2004: 130), he knows that beyond the “exceptional sensual pleasure” he takes “in the act of writing” (245), there is “a great price to pay” for his self-conscious literary cannibalism: he must relinquish his own self and allow inspiration and literary language to possess him — in other words, he must “give up his soul in return” (250). Michelle Kelly (2011: 137) goes even further when she points out that the “conception of writing as a violation of the private” that is put forward in The Master of Petersburg is a way for Coetzee to acknowledge “that the impulses behind the creative process, behind the creation of literature, might be anything but benign” (2011: 135) and to emphasize “the cost of writing” (2011: 140). In Kelly’s view, the dangers of creation result from the act of trespassing certain limits. Insofar as, in the novel’s closing pages, “the beloved stepson becomes Stavrogin, but so too does the author — a cold, amoral figure willing to risk everything” (2011: 146), the consequences of this transgression manifestly concern both the writer and his character.

Coetzee’s betrayal of Dostoevsky as a critique of auto/biographical confession and literary censorship

As Attwell (2016/2015: 181) ponders the idea that Pavel’s “life has […] been turned into currency, a commodity” by the fictional Dostoevsky’s betrayal, the scholar goes so far as to wonder whether it may have occurred to Coetzee himself that writing and selling Nicolas’s life into his book may amount to a betrayal as well, as his “memory will always be associated with this disturbing story”. While this question remains unanswered, Coetzee’s tampering with the historical Dostoevsky’s life and work is beyond question. On the one hand, Coetzee meddles with Dostoevsky’s biography by prematurely killing Pavel and having the Russian novelist betray his stepson’s memory for the sake of writing. On the other hand, Coetzee freely rewrites The Possessed, which — even though The Master of Petersburg is theoretically “a prequel” (Attwell, 2016/2015: 170) to Dostoevsky’s text — notably implies the resurrection, in the early 1990s, of a character Dostoevsky had chosen to kill. In The Possessed, Stavrogin eventually commits suicide, as even his confession to Tikhon fails to help him clear his conscience. As previously pointed out, this confession remained, however, inaccessible to Dostoevsky’s readers for several decades (in fact, until long after the writer’s death in 1881), so that Coetzee’s incorporation of this censored chapter (although in a reimagined form) into his own novel should be seen not only as a betrayal of Dostoevsky’s work, but also as both an implicit (namely textualized rather than thematized) critique of censorship and a tribute to a writer he has identified as one of the novelists “for whom [his] admiration remains undimmed” (see, e.g., Coetzee, 1992: 243). After all, “the novel we see being born in The Master of Petersburg […] is clearly the novel as Dostoevsky wanted to publish it, with Stavrogin’s confession of his offence a central feature” (Attridge, 2004: 127; emphasis in original), as Attridge rightly emphasizes.

Interestingly, Stavrogin’s confession is discussed in some detail in Coetzee’s key essay “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky”, in which he questions “the motive behind Stavrogin’s desire to publish his guilt” (Coetzee, 1985: 228), and thus the truth-value of his confession, arguing that this character is merely “determined to assert” his identity as “that of great sinner”, namely “to attain fame by the short cut of committing an easy abomination and confessing it in public” (Coetzee, 1985: 229). In his critical piece, Coetzee presents the censored chapter of The Possessed as Dostoevsky’s “skeptical interrogation of the confessional impulse” (1985: 228) and the novel as a whole as an “exploration of the limits of secular confession” (1985: 227). Also, he furthers Dostoevsky’s “critique of confession” (1985: 227) by underscoring that “the self cannot tell the truth of itself to itself and come to rest without the possibility of self-deception” (1985: 230). Coetzee concludes that a confession should not be understood as providing a univocal, let alone final, truth, but should be equated with “a possible truth” (1985: 229) among others (all of them “provisional”; 1985: 232), adding that a “confession has no more authority than an account given by any […] biographer” (1985: 214). In other words, neither autobiographical (particularly confessional) narratives, in which a confessing consciousness turns back against itself for the purposes of self-interrogation, nor biographical ones, should be considered as adequate or authoritative vehicles “for the attainment of truth” (1985: 232), even after a lifetime of experience or exploration.

A manifold dialogue with The Possessed and other Dostoevskian narratives: Intertextuality, (af)filiation(s), and authorship

If no absolute truth can be achieved through auto/biography, it follows that any type of text (including overtly fictional ones) can be expected to produce forms of truth that are, if not superior, at least equivalent. This is certainly in line with Coetzee’s conception of literature: like Roland Barthes before him, he envisions every text as an “intertext” (Barthes, 1981: 39; see also Hyde, 2011: 207) partaking of an endless discursive network. In his 2003 Nobel Lecture, “He and His Man” (a supposedly “official” statement characterized by its unusually fictional quality), Coetzee declared, for instance, that “there are but a handful of stories in the world” and that “if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then they must sit forever in silence” (2003: n.p.). Any contemporary writer is thus doomed to be “trapped” in a ubiquitous and “heterogeneous intertextual space” (Reichmann, 2016: 145). The notion of intertextuality, which Coetzee has regularly thematized and textualized in his work, is also central in The Master of Petersburg. Coetzee’s intertextual strategies enable him to establish all kinds of “affiliative patterns” (Lawlan, 1998: 135). In the novel addressed in this article, he resolutely (re)asserts his filiation with Dostoevsky. Despite a likely affinity with Dostoevsky as a man (who was outlived by his stepson but did experience, like Coetzee, the sorrow of child-loss), he is careful to delineate a portrait that lives up to the Russian writer’s complex personality and never lapses into hagiography. Most of all, Coetzee thoroughly engages with Dostoevsky’s fiction in The Master of Petersburg, echoing several Dostoevskian narratives in ways that cannot be examined in depth here, but focusing — as we have seen — on The Possessed in particular. In the footsteps of Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), who coined the terms “dialogism” and “polyphony” to define the poetics developed by Dostoevsky, Julia Kristeva (1982) has described The Possessed as a turning point in the history of modern literature (see Reichmann, 2016: 140) — a seminal polyphonic work in which the confrontation of distinct (and sometimes conflicting) voices and points of view prevails over the assertion of any “master” narrative or authorial perspective. As Angelika Reichmann has underlined in her discussion of Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, and Coetzee, the dialogic or polyphonic novel “results in a loss of authorial authority”, insofar as it “involves giving characters their own voice — recognising them as subjects — without subjecting them to authorial authority or monologising their discourse” (2016: 140; see Bakhtin, 1984: 6–7). This dialogic approach is clearly shared by Coetzee and occasionally thematized in his work, for instance in the final chapter of Elizabeth Costello (2004/1999). While its title (“At the gate”) invokes Kafka, the female protagonist it centres on, an Australian writer and academic who operates as one of Coetzee’s numerous stand-ins, voices highly Dostoevskian ideas when it comes to discussing the role of novelists. In her view, it is not up to them to take stands or adopt rigid stances. Instead, they should allow for the coexistence of various positions: “I am a writer, a trader in fictions”, she says. “I maintain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs would stand in my way” (Coetzee, 2004/1999: 195; emphasis in original). Borrowing the phrase “secretary of the invisible” from “a secretary of a higher order, Czeslaw Milosz”, she further describes herself as

a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right. (Coetzee, 2004/1999: 199)

As a writer, Costello thus sees it as her task to hold “opinions and prejudices at bay” and — since “a belief is a resistance, an obstacle” — “to empty [her]self of resistances”, while remaining aware that being “bereft of all belief’” (Coetzee, 2004/1999: 200) is virtually impossible.

In The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee draws on “aspects of the Dostoevskian novel — resignation from authorial control and the concomitant dialogic nature of the text, combined with extensive intertextuality” (Reichmann, 2016: 149) to challenge traditional conceptions of authorship: not only does he superimpose his own voice (or multiple authorial consciousness) upon Dostoevsky’s classic text, but he also explicitly thematizes the problematic relationship between the creator and his creation. Indeed, by turning the Russian writer into the protagonist of his own (rewritten) fiction, Coetzee collapses the dichotomy traditionally opposing authors to the characters of their novels, since the fictional Dostoevsky becomes both the agent and the object of his own creations. In this sense, writers and their creatures emerge as “rivals for authority” (Reichmann, 2016: 148), which contributes to “dramatising the very notion of the author’s dialogic relationship with his characters, on which the concept of the polyphonic novel is based” (Reichmann, 2016: 147). It can therefore be surmised that, whereas Dostoevsky’s final falsification of Pavel’s diary, in which the former jots down the genesis of The Possessed, may be construed as an attempt to regain authorial control, Coetzee’s decision to make the Russian writer a mere character in a text that partly reworks one of his classic novels serves to question the legitimacy of authorial power.

However, Coetzee’s efforts to undermine conventional (namely monologic) definitions of authorship do not amount to an attempt at discarding any form of authority. In this respect, Reichmann (2016: 147) aptly stresses that “the emergent heterogeneous and constantly shape-shifting authorial consciousness behind The Master of Petersburg” does seem “to be engaged with the Dostoevskian heritage — the word of authority of the literary father”. Ironically, unsettling Dostoevsky’s authorial power allows Coetzee — whether this effect is intentional or not — to reassert his own. In this regard, the act of “inventive parasitizing” (López, 2011: 272) performed by the author of The Master of Petersburg makes it difficult to distinguish Coetzee from the intrusive, even cannibalistic, figure his Dostoevsky comes to embody at the end of the novel, which seems to suggest that literary writing always implies corrupting one’s literary predecessors. Yet, while Coetzee’s novel refrains from idealizing the mythic figure of Dostoevsky and problematizes the complex relationship between fathers and sons, it also aims, as previously suggested, at paying homage to one of the fathers of literary modernity: arguably, this “consistent rewriting of a canonical text” (Reichmann, 2016: 149) seeks to keep a major literary legacy alive by reinventing it.

Finally, the fact that Coetzee’s novel is the product of a dense intertextual network is illustrated by its engagement with a variety of texts not only by, but also on, Dostoevsky. Freud’s “Dostoevsky and Parricide”, Hyde (2011) submits, is one of them. According to this scholar, “Freud’s central thesis on the personality of Dostoevsky (and his personality as expressed in his fiction) posits a diagnosis of an unresolved Oedipus complex resulting in ‘hystero-epilepsy’ as a symptom of uncontrollable neurosis” (2011: 208). To put it in a nutshell, Freud was convinced that, due to the actual murder of his father (probably by serfs, although the exact circumstances of his death remain mysterious), Dostoevsky “never got free from the feeling of guilt arising from his intention of murdering [him]” (Freud, 1997/1928: 245; see also Hyde, 2011: 209) and was thus fixed “unconditionally in the position of the ‘son’ whose life and work is defined in relation to a psychologically ever-present patriarchal authority” (Hyde, 2011: 213). For Hyde, Coetzee performs a multi-layered reversal of this thesis in The Master of Petersburg, which “can be taken as an effort on the part of its author to save Dostoevsky from the condemnation of his works in Freud’s explicit view” (2011: 211). In Coetzee’s novelistic response to Freud, then, Dostoevsky is established as a figure of paternal authority. We have noted that this figure was far from unambiguous. For instance, it can easily be argued that Dostoevsky was a relatively despotic father to Pavel and that the former’s affair with Anna Sergeyevna (not to mention his sexually ambivalent relationship with her daughter Matryona) denotes his jealousy towards his stepson, as well as his mean intention to supplant him — if only symbolically — within the surrogate family he had found for himself in St Petersburg. As previously explained, only his gradual recognition of “Pavel as the archetypical rebellious Freudian ‘son’” (Hyde, 2011: 216), namely an “acceptance of rivalry and resentment as the defining features of the unhappy reality of his relationship with Pavel” (Hyde, 2011: 215), enables him to overcome if not his existential crisis, at least his temporary writer’s block. For the Nechaevites, Dostoevsky similarly “occupies the authoritative position of [a] ‘father’” who “has undergone the familiar transformation from youthful idealist to elderly conservative” (Hyde, 2011: 213) — and against whose embodiment of authority and tradition they rebel on this account.

In both cases, Coetzee seems to affiliate himself to the father figure represented by the Russian novelist. Like his fictional Dostoevsky, he is “a grieving father, a writer”, who “writes a dead son […] back into existence” (Attwell, 2016/2015: 181), even though the resurrection of Nicolas as Nikolai (Stavrogin) — and not as Pavel — implies a perversion of the historical Dostoevskys’ biographies. As regards the Nechaevites, Coetzee also appears to align himself with Dostoevsky, although he does so in a more indirect manner. As such, The Possessed “was intended”, as Attridge (2004: 119) recalls, “as an onslaught on the Russian radical movements of the time”, and was consequently “published in a conservative Russian journal”. While it is difficult to determine the extent to which Coetzee is in keeping with these particular themes, his very re-appropriation of a literary legacy is an act that seems to make an implicit statement about history and, more specifically, against those who are too passionate about the sheer destruction of old world orders and other historical legacies. In that sense, it might be possible to read The Master of Petersburg as Coetzee’s own manifesto against nihilism, whereby he ascribes himself the (not so humble) status — not of a paternal figure — but of Dostoevsky’s literary son.

Towards a postcolonial view of history as a transformative process

If any aspect of Coetzee’s auto/biographical fiction were to be singled out — next to his plea against censorship and in what is otherwise, in many regards, an utterly intimate text — as being of peculiar relevance in the postcolonial context, it might be this radical rejection of nihilism. There is also the related, rather abstract but significant, view of history as a transformative process — one that has the power to transcend binary oppositions in order to produce integrative discourses and epistemologies, instead of pitting the old against the new, the powerful against the powerless, and fathers against sons as “foes to the death” (239) in endless colonial or generational conflicts. Although Coetzee’s concerns in this specific text are not easily transposable in South African terms, it can be illuminating to remember that, among Coetzee’s papers, Attwell found a laconic note likening the children of South Africa (whose longing for equality legitimized the use of violence) to the Nechaevites. On the basis of this note, Attwell (2016/2015: 184) draws a connection between Dostoevsky, who “feared the violence of nihilism”, and Coetzee, who “follows the master’s beckoning finger”, probably because he realized that “possession, as a contagion of anger, accusation and counter-accusation in apartheid-era South Africa, left few people unscathed, including himself” (2016/2015: 186; emphasis in original).

On various occasions, Mike Marais has dwelt on this complex notion of possession, as well as on Coetzee’s and his fictional Dostoevsky’s respective positioning towards the conflictual forces of history. According to Marais (2009: 134), “The Master of Petersburg is […] a novel about its protagonist’s possession by both history and the other”. I have noted that, in Coetzee’s text, Dostoevsky is, to say the least, wary of demons that embody the political ideas which Russian nihilists are possessed by and which supposedly lead to the development of revolutionary activities. However, Dostoevsky himself is shown to be possessed by an otherworldly entity, whom Marais (2006: 85) refers to as “an alterity that exceeds history”. This is the spirit of his late stepson Pavel, whom he desperately wants to raise from the dead. Marais (2009: 131) maintains that, as readers never make out whether or not Pavel has been murdered by the state or by the nihilists, the young man is made to appear as “a victim of the conflict between the two, and therefore of history”. This accounts for Dostoevsky’s wish to reach beyond a purely historical realm instead of either supporting the nihilist revolutionaries or endorsing state oppression. Yet, Marais further argues that what The Master of Petersburg ironically highlights is the fact that Dostoevsky is inescapably steeped in historical circumstances that ultimately contaminate his literary production. More specifically, as it does not go beyond the power relationships permeating the society that operated as the matrix of its production, namely beyond the conflict between state and revolutionary at the core of Russian history, The Possessed — “a novel which condemns political nihilism and thus, in Coetzee’s terms, supplements history’s economy of vengeance” — strengthens these structures of power and consequently “brutalizes its readers” (Marais, 2009: 152). In this effort “to exorcize the spirit of history by which he is possessed” (2009: 144), Dostoevsky — as we have seen — nevertheless betrays Pavel, the haunting ghost that is finally tamed by Dostoevsky’s writing and thus emerges as a character that contributes, first to destabilizing, then to reasserting authorial power.

At another narrative level, one that marks the point at which Coetzee’s reflection extends from biological to literary filiation, the author of The Master of Petersburg seems, for his part, possessed by the otherness of a writer he calls a “master” from the title of a novel in which “rivalry between biological parents and children cannot be seen as separate from rivalry between literary parents and literary heirs” (López, 2011: 271). As previously indicated, Coetzee’s literary tribute to Dostoevsky and one of his masterworks also implies a betrayal that notably involves positing the Russian novelist as a traitor to his own stepson. What Coetzee does not seem to distort, however, is Dostoevsky’s chief political stance, which he arguably qualifies in order to make it his own. As Coetzee is — unlike Dostoevsky — acutely aware of his inescapable locatedness in history and of the fact that “the writer who seeks to be autonomous from history may well supplement it in his or her own writing” (Marais, 2009: 158), his apparent endorsement of Dostoevsky’s nihilism may be seen to point, not to an inaccessible ahistorical realm, but to the need to move towards a view of history that would seek to transcend reductive binary oppositions instead of reproducing them. For Marais (1998: 234), this still amounts to endorsing “oppositional relations” and thus to supplementing history.

The Master of Petersburg and the superior truths of auto/biographical fiction

In several critical pieces, Michael Lackey argues that many of the theorists who have engaged with biographical fiction have tended, from the outset, to define the genre with reference to history or biography, only to dismiss it on these very grounds. In The Historical Novel (1983/1937), for instance, Georg Lukács condemned “the biographical novel as an irredeemable aesthetic form that necessarily distorts and misrepresents the objective proportions of history” (Lackey, 2016b: 3), while other early scholars had primarily been treating biofiction in connection with biography rather than fiction. For Lackey, however, foregrounding the historical or emphasizing the biographical is inadequate as most authors of biofiction expressly deny that they are writing biography. Therefore, the biographical novel essentially belongs to fiction, and its growth resulted from changes in our cultural thinking, which were notably brought about by the advent of postmodernism. In the wake of Alain Buisine and his 1991 essay “Biofictions” (2017/1991), Lackey (2016a: 17) goes on to explain that “postmodernism contributed to the making of the biographical novel, because it underscores the degree to which fiction necessarily plays a role in the construction of a biographical subject” or, for that matter, in the formation of supposedly transparent factual or historical narratives. With Buisine, Lackey (2016a: 17–18) suggests that the epistemological developments induced by the postmodern zeitgeist gave rise to biofiction, a postmodern form of biography that implicitly admits its incapacity to account for the biographical subject accurately, as a result of the author’s ever-present subjective bias. Importantly, however, Lackey (2016a) asserts that while “[p]ostmodernists argue that fictionalizing reality is inescapable”, “most biographical novelists” — even as they “acknowledge the inevitable fictionalization inherent within all writing” — “do something more conscious and strategic. They invent stories that never occurred in order to answer perplexing questions, fill in cultural lacunae, signify human interiors, or picture cultural ideologies” (2016a: 14). In other words, unlike historians or biographers, biographical novelists may choose to adulterate facts in order to convey “a larger political, psychological, and/or cultural truth” (Lackey, 2016a: 12). As Lackey (2016a: 13) further notes, many biographical novelists share the view that they are allowed to adulterate historical facts, as long as their faithfulness to more important symbolic truths ultimately prevails.

It is my contention that, in The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee subordinates historical and biographical facts to the expression of such symbolic and/or cultural truths. Arguably, he even accentuates these alterations so as to make it perfectly clear that he has “no pretense to objectivity” (Mujica, 2016: 12). As we have seen, Coetzee strategically distorts the historical record in two main ways. First, altering the Dostoevskys’ biographies by killing Pavel enables Coetzee to articulate a deeper personal symbolic truth about the process of mourning that ensued from his own son Nicolas’s death. Second, rewriting a canonical text like The Possessed (in the same way as he engaged with other pivotal writers and works in Western literary history, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (2007/1719) in Foe (1986) or Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote (2002/1605) in The Childhood of Jesus (2014/2013)) allows him to formulate an essential cultural truth pertaining to a certain conception of literary creativity, one that runs counter to the naïve, Romantic take on the notion. In the latter approach, novels tend to be presented as “pure inventions”, thus concealing the fact that they are “empirically rooted and historically based” (Lackey, 2016a: 31). Coetzee, on the other hand, clearly suggests that literature is nothing but a vast network of texts that endlessly respond to each other, rendering them semantically interdependent. In the postcolonial context, where authors (including Coetzee himself) frequently write back to the Western canon, this view seems particularly relevant, as does the previously mentioned statement that he is ironically able to make about history itself thanks to his historical distortions.

With this novel, Coetzee thus moves far beyond the bounds of traditional auto/biography and develops what Attwell (2016/2015: 174) referred to as “autobiographical historical fiction”. This new genre allows for a thorough exploration and/or interrogation of major concepts, such as those of authorship, censorship, and, most of all, filiation. As we have seen, writing, even when it encapsulates a historical dimension, involves a betrayal of auto/biographical truths — but it does not necessarily reduce the truth-value of the final fictional product. As a rewriting of Dostoevsky’s classic, this perversion of what Kristeva (1982) termed the “père-version” (or father’s version) also betrays its “master” narrative — only to write it further into immortality.