Master of Petersburg [Hardcover]

J. M. Coetzee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 1994

J M Coetzee's latest fiction centres around a Russian novelist, exiled in Dresden who returns to St Petersburg in 1869 to collect the effects of his dead step son to find himself trapped between the machinery of the state and the stirrings of rebellion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

South African novelist Coetzee takes Fyodor Dostoyevski as his protagonist in a novel set amidst the political ferment of 19th-century Russia.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (February 28, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0436201933
• ISBN-13: 978-0436201936
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,963,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and Slow Man, among others. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Booker Prize (twice). In 2003, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Prose that reads like an authentic Russian text, January 12, 2004

By 

Matthew Krichman (Durango, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Master of Petersburg: A Novel (Paperback)

What is amazing about this book is that Coetzee's prose reads like an authentic translation into English of an original Russian text. To some that may not seem like an impressive accomplishment, or even a desirable characteristic of a novel. But think about how difficult it must have been to do this. He had to have abandoned his practiced and perfected prose in order to learn an entirely different style of writing. He must have read countless translations of Russian novels, particularly Dostoevskiy's (and perhaps even the original texts?) in order to begin to feel the cadence and rhythm of the language. The result is a feeling of period and environment that rings of authenticity. The prose actually serves as a conduit for getting closer and more intimate with the story's main character of Dostoevskiy.

Other than that, this is a fairly mediocre book, certainly not worthy of mention in the same breath as Disgrace or several other works by this Nobel Prize winning author. But for lovers of things Russian or for fans of Dostoevskiy, it could be an interesting read.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not the best of Coetzee's novels, but a good read, August 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Master of Petersburg: A Novel (Paperback)

Dostoevsky and Coetzee readers might find this novel interesting. It seems that Coetzee and Dostoevsky have the same temperaments as writers, that both explore the same crevices of the human psyche. However, I'm not too sure whether Coetzee succeeds in interpreting Dostoevsky's frame of mind between 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov.' In some passages, the novel becomes too obscure to follow, and perhaps someone with a better knowledge of both Dostoevsky's life and his novels might understand what Coetzee is trying to get at in them. In this sense, 'The Master of Petersburg' doesn't stand on its own. But Coetzee's favorite fiction themes--isolated suffering, glimpses of madness, rivalries between family members, revenge, oppression by the known and unknown, the burdens of empathy--are abundantly represented in the novel, and the tension he creates at some moments through his language and images is truly enviable. I definitively recommend this book to those interested in Coetzee's ideas.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dostoevsky's heroes manifest in the form of allusion, January 5, 2005

By 

Matthew M. Yau "Voracious reader" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Master of Petersburg: A Novel (Paperback)

Coetzee audaciously imagines the life of Dostoevsky in THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG. Unlike Leonid Tsypkin's SUMMER IN BADEN BADEN, a novel whose verisimilitude lends an amazing accuracy to that of a documentary, Coetzee's is a pure fantasy of the great 19th century Russian novelist. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, the novel is at once a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination. Dostoevsky under Coetzee's hand obsessively followed his stepson's spirit, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim and whether he loved or despised his stepfather.

Coetzee deftly works up a mystery of the death of Pavel Alexandrovich and a haunting quasi-appearance of the dead from page one. Dostoevsky breathed in deeply, again and again, mentally begging his stepson's ghost to enter him. His grief for Pavel's death was poignant that being alive to him was like, at the moment, a kind of nausea, a desire to be extinguished and annihilated. Since the news came of the death, something had been ebbing out of him as if he was the one being dead: he died but his death failed to arrive.

No sooner had Dostoevsky convinced of his stepson's suicide did a seditionist belonging to the People's Vengeance unveil the truth about Pavel's death. Among Pavel's belongings was a piece of paper with a list of people to be assassinated. In the name of the sedition group, Pavel (who had yet murdered anyone) was to carry out the assassination as soon as signal was given. The assassinations were meant to precipitate a general uprising and to lead to the overthrow of the state. Did Pavel fear of the consequences, or did the People's Vengeance find him to be traitor and execute him?

As Dostoevsky sidled to the heart of the matter, Pavel's death and his left-behind diary revealed a national crisis: one that was redolent of the hideous face of hunger, sickness, and poverty. These were the ways in which real forces manifest themselves in the world. The forces had the origins in the centers of power. Pavel allegedly wrote, distributed subversive pamphlets and was believed to be murdered. Like the People's Vengeance, Pavel could have simply merged with the invisible people of the city and with the conditions that produced him, became underground man who chose to alienate from the hostility of the world. His death, therefore, became the underground group's bait to lure Dostoevsky from Dresden to St. Petersburg so he could write stories of people oppressed by the regime. In a way, Pavel was sacrificed for the cause of revolution, nothing short of martyrdom. But Dostoevsky did not understand how or for whom Pavel was sacrificed nor was he moved by the group's bitterness toward Russia.

The ingenuity of THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG lies in Cozetee's mindful association of the fantasized entities in his novel to Dostoevsky and his heroes, especially Raskolnikov, the underground man, and even Ivan Karamazov. These heroes from Dostoevsky's classics manifest in the form of a distant allusion in Cozetee's work, trickling into Cozetee's lines through a suggestiveness and pervasiveness. The seditionist fantasized a sort of re-creation, a new mindset and way of thinking almost as radical to that of Raskolnikov, who positioned himself on the same level as God and contrived to re-order the world and transcended his conscience. In other way the group resembled the underground man, as the group no longer acted in the name of ideas but in accord to the extreme of senses. It is through the tempestuous political backdrop Dostoevsky embarked on a journey to discovery of the relationship between father and son.