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.