Possessed by the ‘Exhilarating Monster’: J. M. Coetzee’s reading of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg

Abstract

In Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900–1930, Peter Kaye points out that with the publication of Constance Garnett’s translations in the 1910s, ‘Dostoevsky was introduced as an exhilarating monster … on the English horizon’ (Peter Kaye (2006). Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1890–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 6). In the present article the author aims to explore the extent to which J. M. Coetzee’s reading of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994), a consistent rewriting of Devils (1871), repeats this fundamental feature of Dostoevsky’s reception in English modernism. The author argues that by recreating Dostoevsky as a paradoxical amalgam of his diametrically opposed fictional characters, by echoing some critical statements of such English modernists as D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, and by finally representing the veiled, though definitely monstrous, figure (of Stavrogin) as emerging from Dostoevsky’s mirror image, Coetzee corroborates this central figure of Dostoevsky’s English modernist reception only to deconstruct it.

Keywords:

• Figure of monstrousness
• intertextuality
• polyphony
• subversion

Notes

1. This is an issue I address in more detail elsewhere (Reichmann, 2014: 123–4).

2. For a detailed analysis of this intertextual connection, see Reichmann (2012: 103–22).

3. Huxley does not and cannot apply the Kristevan notion to Dostoevsky’s fiction. Yet, his critique in ‘Baudelaire’, and his representation of Spandrell (Stavrogin/Dostoevsky) in Point Counter Point, with their focus on the perverse attitude to the (female) body, parallel the Kristevan argument conspicuously (Huxley, 1978: 122).

4. As is well known, two central elements of Coetzee’s novel are counterfactual: Dostoevsky’s stepson survived the writer by decades and he never even talked to Nechaev. Therefore, to distinguish the Coetzeean from the historical Dostoevsky, I use the adjective ‘fictional’ consistently in the rest of the article whenever I make reference to Coetzee’s representation of Dostoevsky.

5. The highly intriguing issue of (Dostoevsky’s) writing as perversion is outside the scope of the present study. We find a discussion of this question in López (2011: 269–71) and Lawlan (1998: 150); the latter also uses the Kristevan pun of père-version to connect it with abjection and paternal authority.

6. For an extensive list of intertextual connections with various Dostoevsky texts and also for a discussion of the relationship of Coetzee’s novel with Dostoevsky’s biography, see Scanlan (1997: 463–70, 476–7).

7. My reading here is informed by María J. López’s exploration of the author–character relationship in Coetzee’s ‘He and His Man’ and Slow Man (López, 2011: 251–61).

8. Coetzee’s text actually evokes this trope to characterise Nechaev ‘[l]ike that creature of Doctor Frankenstein’s, coming to life’ (Coetzee, 1999: 177). The figure is reinforced by references to Orphic mythology and to writing as the gathering of the scattered pieces of a dead body. See its discussions in Kelly (2014: 142–5) and Marais (2009: 145–8).

9. Here I agree with Franklyn A. Hyde, who also reads the fictional Dostoevsky’s implicit relinquishing of ‘mastership’ and authority in a Bakhtinian paradigm (Hyde, 2010: 211).

10. Dostoevsky acts as a double to Pavel (Scanlan, 1997: 470; Hyde, 2010: 215), who in turn is a double of Nechaev. All three of them contribute to the figure of the monstrous Stavrogin (Scanlan, 1997: 468–9; Marais, 2009: 138–9).