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Stalking Stavrogin: J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and the Writing of The Possessed

1999; Indiana University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jml.1999.0001

1529-1464

Gary Adelman,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Stalking Stavrogin: J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and the Writing of The Possessed Gary Adelman (bio) J.M. Coetzee’s situation as a South African writer living under a repressive regime on the edge of revolution must have contributed to the genesis of The Master of Petersburg (1994), his novel about Dostoyevsky. Although an outspoken adversary of apartheid, he was criticized by leftists for giving prominence in his novels to “a state of agonised consciousness” and subordinate attention to “material factors of oppression and struggle in contemporary South Africa,” 1 while revealing a personal “revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions.” 2 As Coetzee has noted in an interview, Dostoyevsky also had been “held down under censorship” and had “lived through the philosophical debates” of his day, 3 yet still found it possible to let his stories tell themselves. Reflecting bitterly on the influence that political pressures have had on his writing, Coetzee said in his 1987 Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech, The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life. All expressions of that inner life, no matter how intense, no matter how pierced with exultation or despair, suffer from the same stuntedness and deformity. I make this observation with due [End Page 351] deliberation, and in the fullest awareness that it applies to myself and my own writing as much as to anyone else . . . less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power, unable to move from elementary relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation to the vast and complex human world that lies beyond them. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from a prison. . . . But how do we get from our world of violent phantasms to a true living world? 4 In the same year, Coetzee turned his thoughts to the occasional novelists able to evolve their own paradigms and myths despite political pressure to support a particular ideology. Far from merely supplementing the historical text, theirs are novels that rival history 5 —much as The Possessed can be said to rival an historical life and times of Sergei Nechaev. How does the great writer withstand the pressures to conform? he asks. What sort of personality makes it possible? The time, place, and circumstances of The Master of Petersburg correspond roughly to those related in “Stavrogin’s Confession” (the suppressed Part II, Chapter IX, “At Tikhon’s,” published only after Dostoyevsky’s death, which recounts the rape and suicide of a twelve-year-old girl). In both texts, there are a landlady and her twelve-year-old daughter called Matryosha; there is a lodger who rents a room in their small apartment, in Coetzee’s novel the fictional Dostoyevsky, come alone to Petersburg in the fall of 1869 (the year Dostoyevsky began writing The Possessed). This fictional Dostoyevsky in some ways plays the part of Stavrogin, the lodger in The Possessed. Coetzee’s Dostoyevsky does not rape Matryosha and then play with her mind, driving her to suicide, but conceives the whole depraved scene. Erotically curious, he imagines telling her a story of the seduction of a young girl. . . . A story full of intimate detail and innuendo which . . . frightens her and disturbs her sleep and makes her so doubtful of her own purity that three days later she gives herself up to him in despair, in the most shameful of ways. 6 When he actually sleeps with Matryosha’s mother, he leaves the door open so that the girl can hear, anticipating his future character Stavrogin, whose plan of corruption involves leaving the door ajar when he makes love with his mistress and afterwards running his fingers, smelling of sex, through the girl’s hair. The historical Dostoyevsky remained abroad between 1867 and 1871 for reasons of debt. He is brought back to Petersburg in Coetzee’s novel on learning from his friend Apollon Maykov that his stepson, with whom he never got along in real life, has killed himself. The actual Pavel, Pasha Isaev, died in 1900, but the contrivance...