Angst for Nothing

...In a sharply rendered meeting Fyodor asks the police investigator Maximov, himself an echt Dostoyevskian, "'When you read about Karamzin or Karamzov or whatever his name is, when Karamzin's skull is cracked open like an egg, what is the truth: Do you suffer with him, or do you secretly exult behind the arm that swings the ax?'" Then the writer offers a cogent reprimand to critics: '"Reading is being the arm and being the ax and being the skull...

...Discovering what happened to Pavel turns out to be the least of his quest...

...And when Fyodor, who professes to despise all that Nechaev represents, folds the younger man to his breast and gives him all the rubles he has, those are standard Dostoyevskian gambits, invitations to endless psychological or theological exegesis...

...When Fyodor reflects that he is behaving like a character in a book, it might be a small joke by Coetzee, except that there is no place for jokes in these brooding pages...

...With Pavel (or possibly Turgenev) on his mind, Fyodor observes, '"Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: Is that what underlies revolution?'" When Fyodor insists that Nechaev is not an anarchist or a nihilist?He is a sensualist...

...Readers acquainted with the master's writings will have no trouble catching the allusions to Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karatnazov...

...Fyodor is in the droshky and the tenement is where his 21-year-old stepson, Pavel, lived...

...Her daughter, Matryona, who was a special friend of Pavel's, is also knowing in her simpleminded way...

...Fyodor is a bit worried that his need to get into Pavel may lure him into the girl...

...He has no difficulty in imagining this child in her ecstasy...

...He rubs his face in the wet earth, burrows his face into it...

...Her tongue like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats...

...Sergei Nechaev was in real life just such a radical...

...If you are concerned for your posthumous reputation, don't provoke a novelist...

...Implicated in the murder of a student named Ivanov (an event that figures in this work as well), he would be the prototype for Peter Ver-khovensky, the insidious terrorist of Demons...

...The appearance of Nechaev, a leader of a revolutionary group that Pavel was somehow associated with, and by whom he may have been killed, also gives the stop-and-start narrative a welcome jolt...

...For Fyodor, Nechaev's proclamations about the People's Vengeance miss the deeper truth...

...Anyway, Fyodor does not come out too well from his confrontations with Nechaev, who is adept at throwing the writer's own words into his teeth...

...Before he knows it, the writer is in a steamy, joyless romance with the landlady, Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina, who senses that she is merely a means for him to reach Pavel...

...Pavel has killed himself or been killed, and the great writer has come from his home in Dresden bowed down with Dostoyevskian guilt, remorse, longing...

...Fyodor moves into Pavel's room at 63 Svechnoi Street, tries on his son's suit, sits at his desk, writes in his diary...

...She is given to spying on her mother and Fyodor in bed and seems to have a precocious understanding of what they are doing there...

...But of course Dostoyevsky took his revenge in Demons...

...Coetzee, a professor of literature at the University of Cape Town, demonstrates that he has thought deeply about Dostoyevsky's work and has managed to enter into his spirit...

...His imagination seems to have no bounds...

...He outlived Dostoyevsky in what one biographer has called a parasitic existence...

...The meetings of Fyodor and Nechaev, who goes around in drag as a disguise, are at once a clash between irreconcilable ideas and a coming-together of kindred emotions...

...The Master of Petersburg is no fictional biography...

...He covers his face with his hands...

...Pavel, or Pasha Isaev, was in real life the son of Dostoyevsky's first wife, Maria, by her first husband, Aleksandr, a feckless sort of drunk who may be glimpsed as Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, General Ivolgin in The Idiot, and Captain Snegiryov in The Brothers Kara-mazov...

...But the real Pavel did not expire as a promising youth...

...The master of the title is none other than Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, who arrives at 63 S vechnoi Street, Petersburg in October 1869, after Crime and Punishment but before The Possessed (or as it is called in its latest English translation by Richard Pevear and Larisa Volo-khonsky, Demons...

...There is actually a remembered scene of a man tearing off the wings of a fly that is too busy copulating to notice...

...reading is giving yourself up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering.'" The main work being evoked is Demons, which lends Master what political dimension it has...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman FOR THE POLITICAL NOVELIST J. M. Coetzee, a shift in setting from 20th-century South Africa to 19th-century Russia may have seemed less like a leap than a further opportunity to analyze a society in the throes—with misery rampant, power seeping away from a repressive authority, and unpredictable, undefinable, dangerous radicalism in the air...

...he seeks to make up to the prematurely departed for all the ways that a father fails a son and, more than that, to join spiritually with Pavel, re-create him, as only a novelist can create a beloved character...

...Emotions keep bursting forth in symptoms: "From the depths of his throat, where he can no longer stifle it, a sound breaks out, a groan...

...Admirers of Coetzee's intense prose and unsparing vision in such works as Life & Times of Michael K and Age of Iron may regret that the politics of his new, seventh novel are buried in drifts of Russian angst, than which nothing is angstier...

...To capture the Russian's style, Coe-tzee goes in for gnomic gestures that can be wearisome if you are not in the interpretive mood, and for large declarations, sometimes of religious import...

...Fyodor rhapsodizes: "Not what one would call an educated woman...

...but will one ever hear Russian spoken more beautifully...

...Master starts in a 19th-century manner that comes and goes throughout the short book: "A drosh-ky passes slowly down a street in the Hay-market district of St...

...Missing, however, is the rush of events that give Dostoyevsky's novels their energy and fascination...

...tears run over his fingers...

...But he was more interesting when he was writing in the spirit of J. M. Coetzee...

...He thinks, '"What a Jewish performance !"' (Why not a Russian Orthodox performance...

...When the epileptic Fyodor reflects that possibly the entire state in which he finds himself can be called a fit, the reader may nod in agreement, particularly after learning that at Pavel's graveside Fyodor "kneels, then pitches awkwardly forward till he lies flat upon the mound, his arms extended over his head...

...The self-flagellating Fyodor thinks of Pavel's J. M. Coetzee ghost entering him...

...You are using me to get to someone else," says Anna, one of those unlettered but instinctively knowing folk one comes across in Russian fiction...

...He is an extremist of the senses"—the writer might be confessing his own inclinations...

...After Aleksandr died, the infatuated young writer married the widow and gamed a stepson...

...Fyodor's final way of celebrating Pavel is signaled early and does not have much dramatic punch...

...So much for that...

...Before a tall tenement building the driver reins in his horse...

...but it is he who is trying to understand, feel, be Pavel...

...Her fluttering tongue tells him what Coe-tzee is telling us, that it is only an artist who can bring the departed back to life...

...This being Slavic territory, Coetzee attempts to get into the soul of Dostoyevsky, much as his Dostoyevsky attempts to get into the soul of an imagined and idealized Pavel...

...He is crying freely, his nose is streaming...

...The characters not only seem borrowed, but despite all its flashes of intelligence, Master as a whole has a murky quality...