The Master of Petersburg: A Novel

J. M. Coetzee

The Master of Petersburg: A Novel
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Penguin Books Ltd
Country
United Kingdom
Published
1 November 1995
Pages
256
ISBN
9780140238105

The Master of Petersburg: A Novel

J. M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson’s landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel’s life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson’s ghost-and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy-Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.

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