1Set in 1869, Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994) is an intense and disturbing post-modernist representation of loss and mourning as well as a study of the writing process and the dark mysteries of creativity.

2The metaphor of the ghost—according to the dictionary ‘the soul or specter of a dead person, usually believed to inhabit the netherworld and to be capable of returning in some form to the world of the living’—is pervasive and it is explored from a psychological and political as well as an artistic point of view. The ghost, usually associated with the figure of a haunting discarnate entity, spirit or demon—another key word in the text along with vision and visitation—enhances the nocturnal dimension of the novel, portraying a world, as the central character says, ‘of unrelieved night’1. But it acquires its true relevance when one thinks of the double meaning inscribed in the Greek etymology of ‘phantom’ from which the word ghost derives. Phanein in fact means both ‘to make present to the eye’ and ‘mere appearance’, a word taken up in the Latin phantasma, meaning illusion.

3By using as his center of intelligence the historical Dostoevsky at the time he was preparing to write Besy, The Possessed (1871-1872), most recently and accurately translated as Demons, a political novel about nihilism and revolution and by cleverly manipulating facts and fiction, Coetzee writes a dark and poignant tale which investigates the complex relationship between reality and art, historical discourse and private drama.

4While hinging on the experience of mourning and guilt, in itself a Dostoevskian and a post-colonial epitomatic theme—‘structured by a tension between the oppressive memory of the past and the liberatory promise of the future’ postcolonial narrative is ‘necessarily involved in a work of mourning’2—the novel provides a strong, albeit indirect, commentary on a larger and recognizable contemporary historical reality, that of post-colonial 20th-century South Africa in the throes of repressive authority and dangerous radicalism before it became a democratic state with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, the year Coetzee published his novel.

5Despite distance in place and time, it seems that Coetzee is writing about his country in a pre-revolutionary Russia disguise: the very name Petersburg, which is a small town not far from Pretoria, also ‘conjures up homonymically what might be a South African city’, being like Coetzee’s Cape Town, the most ‘European’ of Russian cities.3

6In this ambitious novel which is shot through with an atmosphere of endless expectancy reminiscent of Beckett,4 a major influence on the author’s work in the sparse, compressed and highly paratactic style revolving around a succession of powerful images5, Coetzee imagines a poor, self-absorbed and tormented man returning to St. Petersburg under a false name from Dresden, where he and his wife and child are living, after the untimely death of Pavel Isaev, the son of his late first wife.

He is a man in late middle age, bearded and stooped, with a high forehead and heavy highbrows that lend him an air of sober self-absorption. He wears a dark suit of somewhat démodé cut (1).

7As it will turn out, the character from which the whole story is viewed is no other than the master of Petersburg himself, Fedor Michajlovic Dostoevsky, author of such masterpieces as Poor Folk and Crime and Punishment adroitly alluded to in the novel, who in order to escape his creditors was living in Dresden in self-imposed exile under the vigilant eyes of the Russian secret police.

8Recounted in the third person present-tense, with the inclusion of some interior monologue, the narrative attentively tracks the consciousness of Dostoevsky as he painfully measures ‘the blow’ his loss has brought to his existence.

Yet he cannot stop, his eyes move restlessly from one passing figure to the next, searching for the set of the shoudlers, the tilt to the walk, that belong to his lost son. By his walk he will recognize him: first the walk, then the form (49).

9Back in St. Petersburg, his home town which appears to his estranged eyes ‘as a ghost-vision’ (116) and distraught with sorrow expressed in eloquently stark animal imagery—he howls and ‘groans like a sick ox’ (114)—he seems motivated not so much by a desire to master his loss, as by the need to resurrect the dead, by his refusal to surrender Pavel to the oblivion of the grave: ‘I will come back: the same promise he made when he took the boy to school for the first term’ (5).

10Like the mythical Orpheus who traveled to the underworld in an attempt to coax Eurydice ‘out of the entrails of hell’, ‘walking backwards step by step, whispering the dead woman’s name’, Dostoevsky would like to resurrect his son. He is ‘trying to cast a spell. But over whom: over a ghost or over himself?’ (5).

11Living and sleeping in the room Pavel rented from a widow called Anna Sergeyevna who lives next door with her daughter Matryona, he tries ‘to evoke a spirit that can surely not yet have left these surroundings’, (3) the spirit of a young man he had brought up and loved ‘as my son’, ‘as my own flesh and blood’ (31).

12Unable to write—‘The writing would be that of a madman— vileness, obscenity, page after page of it, untameable’ (18)—and totally estranged from the outside world—‘His world has contracted; his world is within his breast’ (22)—he opens Pavel’s suitcase:

Neatly folded on top is a white cotton suit. He presses his forehead to it. Faintly the smell of his son comes to him. He breathes in deeply, again and again: his ghost entering me. (3-4)

13Haunted by visions and dreams, he walks on ‘a cold misty day’ in the cemetry of Yelagin island through the avenues of the dead. He knows he ‘is not in mourning’ for he ‘has not said farewell to his son, he has not given his son up. On the contrary he wants his son returned to life’ (52).

14His fury against the living, ‘and most of all toward living children—‘If there were a newborn babe here at this moment, he would pluck if from his mother’s arms and dash it against the rock’ (9)—is even directed against even Matryona whom he discovers had befriended and loved Pavel:

... he is in a rage with everyone who is alive when his child is dead. In a rage most of all against this girl, whom for her very meekness he would like to tear limb from limb. (16)

15Later on, fighting against epilepsy which manifests itself in the form of a demonic possession, ‘the vision, the fit, the rictus of the imagination’ (77), he says:

In the tiny room with its stale odours, she gives off a faint, desperate smell of spring, of flowers, that he cannot bear. Deliberately, with teeth clenched, he hurts her, and then hurts her again and again, watching her face all the time for something that goes beyond mere wincing, mere bearing of pain: for the sudden wide-eyed look of a creature that begins to understand its life is in danger. (77)

16His unrelenting attempt to conjure up his lost son which accounts for the most heart-felt passages in the novel, reaching its climax when he visits the scene of his death, is accompanied by an equally furious need for self-punishment: ‘But being alive is, at this moment, a kind of nausea. He wants to be dead. More than that: to be extinguished, annihilated’ (16-17).

17Intimately related to his desperate need ‘to bring back his son’ is the intense but frustrating relationship he establishes with the landlady. But even Anna whose ‘moody air’ and ‘lustrous’ eyes remind him of those of ‘Byzanthine saints’ and whose tongue is ‘like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats’, (13) fails to work as a consoling substitute to heal the wounds of his loss.

In the act there is nothing he can call pleasure or even sensation. It is as though they are making love through a sheet, the grey, tattered sheet of his grief. A the moment of climax he plunges back into sleep as into a lake. As he sinks Pavel rises to meet him. His son’s face is contorted in despair: his lungs are bursting, he knows he is dying, he knows he is past hope... (56).

18Beginning to cry he says: ‘I am behaving like a character in a book ... In a book the woman would respond to his grief with a surge of pity. The woman does not’ (27).

19As the story gradually unfolds and Dostoevsky, who is only after Pavel’s papers, becomes caught in a web of preposterous and Kafkaesque accusations relating to the mysterious circumstances of Pavel’s death—the police take his passport forbidding him to leave the city—the novel, while retaining its inner dimension, reads almost like a thriller.

20The official version is that Pavel has fallen from a disused shot tower on one of St. Petersburg’s quays6. But was it really an accident? Or was he pushed by the Tzar’s secret police as the terrorists claim? According to Councillor Maximov, the judicial investigator in Pavel’s case, who physically resembles the magistrate in Crime and Punishment7—‘a bald man with the tubby figure of a peasant woman’ and pale lashes, ‘like a cat’s’ (31)—Pavel did not commit suicide but was murdered by Nechaev, the cynical leader of a band of fanatic revolutionaries whom to Dostoevsky’s dismay turns out to have been a major influence on his stepson. Having found among Pavel’s papers a list of people to be assassinated as a prelude to a general uprising, Maximov toys with him in the hope of gaining information about the revolutionaries. But Dostoevsky correctly suspects his stepson did not take his life. As he tells Matryona:

No one kills himself, Matryosha. You can put your life in danger but you cannot actually kill yourself. It is more likely that Pavel put himself at risk, to see whether God loved him enough to save him. (75)

21On the run from the police and dressed as a woman to escape detection, Nechaev is ‘a man of blood’ pursuing a dream of apocalyptic destruction and an impostor who plays at being a true revolutionary believer though his only goal is to have power.

Christ in his wrath, he thinks: that is who he models himself to. The Christ of the old Testament, the Christ who scourged the usurers out of the temple. Even the costume is right: not a dress but a robe. An imitator, a pretender; a blasphemer. (103)

22Nechaev, the chief nihilist, on whom the character Verkhovensky is modeled, the demonically possessed villain in Dostoevsky’s novel, is a devilish figure—‘He has what the Greeks called a demon. It speaks to him. It is the source of his energy’ (113)—and he is also a historical individual. He was the leader of the ‘People’s Vengeance’ underground group, modeled on the ‘People’s Will’, the Russian revolutionary terrorists of the 1870s, found guilty of the murder of one of its own members for suspected treason, the young student Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov who planned an insurrection against the authority of the tsar during the late 1860s and who also figures in Coetzee’s novel as a police spy disguised as a tramp.

23Nechaev embodies Nihilism, an ideology that demands the destruction of the current social order. Like the conspirators in Demons, his ideology and psyche are morbid8. He ‘stands first and foremost for the violent overthrow of all the institutions of society, in the name of a principle of equality—equal happiness for all, if not that, then equal misery for all’ (35-6). As Dostoevsky says,

Nechaevism is not an idea. It despises ideas, it is outside ideas. It is a spirit, and Nechaev himself is not its embodiment but its host; or rather, he is under possession by it....
When I first saw [him] in Geneva, he struck me as an unprepossessing, morose, intellectually undistinguished ordinary young man... a dull, resentful, and murderous spirit. (43-44)

24The son then has been in rebellion against the political father, the Tzar, in his involvement with the Nechaevite conspirators, but especially against his stepfather, as Dostoevsky discovers when Maximov reads aloud from the confiscated draft of a story Pavel wrote about a young man who kills a lecherous landowner with a butcher’s axe to prevent him from raping a young peasant girl. Far from constituing incriminating evidence of Pavel’s subversive ideas, this naively romantic story is instead a testimony of Oedipal conflicts, of a private and plainly autobiographic drama adumbrating the theme of parricide central to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s next work.

I have no parents... I was left alone with my stepfather, a gloomy man who barely addressed a word to me from one day to the next. I was lonely; my only friends were among the servants; it was from them that I got to kow the sufferings of the people (151).

25This sad reality is confirmed in one of the most powerful scenes in the novel when Dostoevsky is confronted with Nechaev who challenges the worth of his life and work. It is then that he painfully realizes that the orphaned young man had tried to cope with his situation by finding a surrogate father to provide the love and moral guidance he had deprived him of.

Pavel Isaev was a comrade of ours. We were his family when he had no family. You went abroad and left him behind. You lost touch with him, you became a stranger to him. Now you appear from nowhere and make wild accusations against the only real kin he had in the world.... You lost Isaev and we saved him. (119-120)

26Here one can see how the personal and the political interact and how the revolution hoped for by Nechaev is envisaged in terms of a generation gap and clash, of the troubled father/son motif which is central to the novel.

27As details about Pavel’s personality are gradually disclosed—his generosity, his kindness, ‘a being of god-like strength and beauty’ (68) in Matryona’s idealized eyes, his rivalry with his stepfather who after his mother’s death had married a girl his own age, and most importantly his loneliness, as he belatedly comes to realize— Dostoevsky, overwhelmed by a feeling of betrayal, refuses to cooperate with the investigation.

28Though he is aware of his absurd behaviour—‘How long can he go on waiting for a ghost?’ (154)—he finds himself unable to leave Petersburg, while Dresden with ‘his wife, his books and papers’ ceases to beckon him as ‘an atoll of peace’ (204).

‘I do not know whether to hate this city for what it did to Pavel, ’ he says, or to feel even more tightly bound to it. Because it is Pavel’s home now. He will never leave it, never travel as he wanted to’. (129)

29Later, in a pressing confrontation with Nechaev in a dingy and damp cellar, realizing he has fallen into a trap and that Pavel’s death was merely ‘the bait to lure him from Dresden to Petersburg’, (203) he refuses to comply to his request to write a statement denouncing the authorities for Pavel’s death and accuses Nechaev instead. Dostoevsky is convinced that Pavel’s writing expressed more his resentment against him and his shameful neglect of the obligations of fatherhood, than against the state or his disavowal of his earlier political utopianism which had led to his confinement in Siberia. He is now searching not only for the ghost of his stepson, but for signs that the poor boy forgave him.

The touchstone is not the heart and how the heart feels, but death and how the dead boy feels!
At this moment the clearest of visions comes to him, a vision of Pavel smiling at him, at his peevishness, his tears, his histrionics, at what lies behind the histrionics too. The smile is not of derision but on the contrary of friendliness and forgiveness. He knows! He thinks: He knows and does not mind! (28)

30The final revelation that in all likelihood Pavel was murdered by Nechaev because he refused to kill him as a proof of his loyalty to him—Dostoevsky’s name was in the list of people marked down for execution9—together with his realization that Pavel’s naive writing was ‘simply a way of reaching’ him (137)—takes him to the verge of madness.

31In the last chapter entitled ‘Stavrogin’, the central character of Demons, he takes Pavel’s diary and finally begins to write on the first empty page.

And he is not himself any longer, not a man in the forty-ninth year of his life. Instead he is young again, with all the arrogant strength of youth....
In the blood of this young man, this version of Pavel, is a sense of triumph. He has passed through the gates of death and returned; nothing can touch him any more. He is not a god but he is no longer human either. He is in some sense, beyond the human, beyond man. (242)

32What he writes about is a heated erotic encounter between Pavel and a student he takes to his room. The pleasure is made more acute by Matryona’s watching, by his vicious exhibitionist’s will to expose the young girl to their lovemaking. This writing evokes Stavrogin’s confession, the crucial and suppressed episode of the novel the real Dostoevsky began in 1869 which recounts Stavrogin’s violation of a twelve-year-old girl named Matryona who, as a consequence of his act, will commit suicide: ‘I write perversions of the truth’ he says. ‘I chose the crooked road and take children into dark places. I follow the dance of the pen’ (236). In this perspective, Coetzee’s novel can be read not only as a fictionalized account of the genesis of Demons, but as an attempt to reinstate Stavrogin’s crime and confession as its main source (Attridge: 127).

33The ‘assault upon the innocence of a child’ is ‘an act for which he cannot expect forgiveness’ (249) and Stavrogin will eventually hang himself. Despite his wild antics, which include pulling a man of high social standing by the nose and biting the ear of the governor, Stavrogin is not insane; this is a point Dostoevky leaves to his last page when a doctor examines his brain and declares that no madness is present. He is instead a haunted character, a sort of superman dominated by the life-denying forces of nihilism, someone who, like the historical Dostoevsky, seems to be ‘beyond the consolations of religion or messianic politics’10.

34Demons is an elaboration of the psychology of guilt which began with Crime and Punishment which portrays the harrowing confrontation between Raskolnikov’s nihilist beliefs which prompt him to commit a murder in an attempt to prove his supposed superiority and his morality that condemns his actions, a study which was to culminate in the Brothers Karamazov. In Stavrogin, a ‘strong, handsome, elegant and clever’11 Byronic hero, Dostoevsky is continuing his investigation of ‘an aberration short of madness’, the mind of an aristocrat ‘who seeks to break every taboo in pursuit not of pleasure but perhaps of guilt itself, a modification of one of Raskolnikov’s motives, the idea of a crime to demonstrate one’s exceptionality’ (Belknap: 140).

35It is precisely this ‘searching exploration of the intertwining of pity and cruelty’ which Coetzee acknowledged as the paramount characteristic of Dostoevsky’s ‘darker characters’12, that gives Stavrogin his ambivalent fascination and poignant complexity.

36Many hints indicate that the protagonist of Coetzee’s novel is very close to the historical Dostoevsky. The intertextuality is indeed so great that it virtually becomes ‘a kind of palimpsest of Dostoevsky’s life and work’13. Well known aspects of his biography feature in it, such as his self-imposed exile in Dresden to escape his creditors, his perilous passion for gambling, his confinement in Siberia, his tyrannical father and his epilectic seizures which in Freud’s interpretation appear intimately connected since they are the physical manifestation of guilt over his repressed wish for the death of his father, who was possibly murdered by his own serfs because of his hot temperedness. Dostoevsky rarely mentioned this event, but Oedipal themes are recurrent in his work14. Most importantly, Dostoevsky, who is very close to Stavrogin, becomes a sort of alter ego or double of Coetzee himself.

37Like Dostoevsky, Coetzee has lived in a time of political unrest and widespread violence and has written with the threat of censorship hanging over him. Like him, he has struggled to comprehend the nature of authoritarianism and rebellion, examining the inner lives of both oppressors and victims in Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K’15. Again, like Dostoevsky, Coetzee chose voluntary exile abroad for a time before returning to his native country and has been accused by his antagonists and fellow writers of being reactionary, of failing to display a lack of concrete political engagement.16

38In addition, he has been concerned with the theme of guilt and confession which in Dostoevsky’s later novels is not just ‘a way of allowing character to expose himself, to tell his own truth’, but becomes the focus of the narrative ‘with all its attendant psychological, moral, epistemological, and finally metaphysical problems’ (Coetzee 1992: 275). The confessional impulse is indeed at the core of Stavrogin’s insistence on his own guilt and responsibility. ‘The identity Stavrogin is determined to assert is that of great sinner. He presents his crime against the child as all the more contemptible— great in its contemptibilty—because its motives were so idle, its passion so flat’ (Coetzee 1992: 289).

39At the same time as he enforces the connections between fiction and history which further corroborate a metafictional reading of the novel, however, Coetzee makes the gap between his protagonist and the historical Dostoevsky absolutely clear. ‘The basic premise on which Coetzee’s work is built—Dostoevsky’s painful coming to terms with Pavel’s death—is glaringly contrafactual’ (Attridge: 118). Dostoevsky had a stepson called Pavel from his first marriage to Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva who did not die in 1869, but actually lived on for twenty years after his stepfather’s death in 1881. In addition, he certainly was no generous, sensitive and promising youth, but a parasite, always begging for money.

40Now, if one considers that Coetzee had a son exactly the same age as Pavel who died in a mysterious fall from a high balcony a few years before the publication of the novel (1994), it becomes immediately clear that Coetzee made these alterations in Dostoevsky’s biography to achieve distance. But it also indicates that the identification with Dostoevsky is to be considered ludicrously self-mocking.

41Far from being idealized, Dostoevsky, who early on in the novel was portrayed by the guileful state functionary Maximov as ‘a man of gifts, a man of special insight’ (45), is indeed belittled, reduced to a man, actually ‘half a man’ (192).

42The final act of writing does not move the fictional Dostoevsky from bereaved despair to resolution, it does not coincide with the primacy of his identity and with the assessment and affirmation of his surviving powers. On the contrary, Dostoevsky is far ‘from being a master. There is a crack running through me. What can one do with a cracked bell? A cracked bell cannot be mended’ (141). His encounter with death is an encounter with the limits of his ability to represent it. Like the first-person narrator in Foe, Dostoevsky discovers that ‘the space of death is a space in which language has no place’.17

43Aware that he has betrayed everyone and feeling ‘a dull sense of torment’, ‘like a soldier shot on the battlefield, bleeding, seeing the blood, feeling no pain’ (250), he realizes that the price he had to pay for being a writer was ‘to give up his soul in return’ (250).

44The ghosts to exorcise in the novel then are not just those of pre-revolutionary Russia which so closely resemble South Africa poised on the brink of upheaval, or those of fatherhood adumbrated in the theme of generational strife—the divide between a middle-aged, disillusioned, ‘sentimentalizing’ (193) and conservative writer who rejects vengefulness and the Nihilist, self-destructive views espoused by the young, namely by Nechaev who believes that ‘if you do not kill you are not taken seriously’ (195)18. They are those of a disillusioned man unable to wring meaning and redemption from his work. When in the filthy cellar crowded with ‘famished children waiting for the angel of death’ (180) Dostoevsky asks Nechaev: ‘What of me, what of my place in your utopia?’ (185), it is not difficult to imagine Coetzee voicing his impotence in ascribing meaning to a world in the grips of madness, chaos, and destruction.

45The final meaning which the novel most dramatically conveys is that there is no comfort, nor solace or cure to be had from writing: ‘Now that his succession is extinct’, Dostoevsky feels he has become ‘not only old, but a ghost, an angry, abandoned spirit’ (116), ‘an old man in a corner with nothing to do but to pick over the pages of his losses’ (124); in Nechaev’s most crude words, ‘an old, blinkered horse going round and round in a circle, rolling out the same old story day after day’ (186).

46Written in language of classical poise and extraordinary emotional resonance, The Master of Petersburg is a bleak and a compelling novel, an anticonsolatory narrative of mourning that in its subtle convergence of psychological and political elements steadfastly resists neutralization and redemption.

47For the master of Petersburg the desire for transcendence and oblivion proves unattainable and illusory and it converts instead into a desire for death. There is no way to overcome loss and guilt, but only immersion in pain expressed in images of suicidal destruction.

48‘I am the very one who died and was buried... Pavel the one who lives and will always live’ (124), thinks Dostoevsky, as he has a vision ‘of a bay, frozen, dead, buried in an iron coffin beneath the snow-piled earth, waiting out the winter, waiting for the spring’ (76).