The master of Petersburg

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. In 1869, Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson. Coetzee dares to imagine the life of Dostoevsky, whom we watch as he obsessively follows his stepson’s ghost, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim, and whether he loved or despised his stepfather. 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. In 1869, an exiled Russian novelist returns to St Petersburg to collect the effects of his dead stepson, Pavel. But the stepson's incriminating papers have been found by the Tsarist police and the novelist finds himself drawn into an underworld of suspicion, revolution and danger.