Master Of Petersburg Research Articles

Biographies of Russian Writers as a Target of Post-Truth

The article examines the influence of the phenomenon of post-truth on the creation of artistic images of Russian writers in the novel and screen arts. The essence, tools and role of post-truth in the construction of political and cultural life were described by Plato in the “The State.” Having spread in modern times, post-truth seeks to replace the truth of history, to infiltrate real destinies and biographies, to act in their place, to operate with imaginary things instead of authenticity, to use the “bad is more interesting than good” principle. The experience of the first Russian silent film biography of A. S. Pushkin (1910) and all the subsequent eighteen biographical films about the poet’s fate showed the flaws of artistic adaptations dedicated to real heroes: historical unreliability, untruth of character, deliberate distortion of biography, the introduction of false, politically biased versions for the sake of greater showiness and scandalousness. The central plot of the article is devoted to artistic texts related to the image of F. M. Dostoevsky. Boris Akunin’s novel “The Turkish Gambit” (1998) touches on the events of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878, describing them from openly Ottomanophile positions, painting the characters fighting for Russian interests in dark colors. The novel author focuses on author of the “Writer’s Diary;” depicted namelessly, but with a full set of biographical signs, he is vindictively and scandalously defamed. Dostoevsky is present in J. M. Coetzee’s novel “The Master of Petersburg” (1994, translated from English 1999), also in the “shame and fall” perspective. The image of the real Dostoevsky is deliberately distorted, rather than elevated, in the created neo-myth — the debunking of the Russian writer was apparently the true goal of the novelist.

Аллюзивный аналог как востребованный способ перевода аллюзий с английского языка на русский в тексте художественного произведения (на примере романа Д. М. Кутзее «Осень в Петербурге»)

The study aims to identify the most popular mode of allusion translation based on the comparison of the original text of J. M. Coetzee’s novel “The Master of Petersburg” and its English-Russian translation. The researcher considers the notions of “allusion”, “intertext”, “intertextuality”, “precedential text”, functions of allusions, means of allusion translation. Scientific originality of the study lies in proposing a classification and structure of allusions and at the same time explaining their significance in the text of the novel from the researcher’s standpoint; as well as in identifying and analysing such modes of allusion translation as allusive equivalents and translation transformations. As a result, it has been proved that the use of allusive equivalents is the most popular translation mode, as most allusions in the novel are based on the facts of biblical, mythological, literary and historical origin containing toponyms and anthroponyms that are well known to readers.

ЛИНГВОКУЛЬТУРОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ ОБРАЗА ПЕТЕРБУРГА В БИОФИКЦИОНАЛЬНОМ ПОВЕСТОВАНИИ ДЖ. КУТЗЕЕ «THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG»

The article explores linguacultural characteristics of Petersburg in J. Coetzee’s English-language novel "The Master of Petersburg", the postmodern biography of the outstanding Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky. For creating verisimilitude of his biofictional narration, the author skillfully constructs the external linguacultural context with the help of linguistic markers of Russian cultural text localization. However, the English author does not seek to create an actual representation of Petersburg, fulfilling the city space with fictional urban objects. This intentional play with the semantic correlation between reality and fiction provokes bilingual readers, acquainted with the toponymy of the Russian city, to suffer from cognitive dissonance

Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

The Author is Dead, Long Live the Author! Postmodern Metanarrative and the Performance of the Author Function

This research paper critically examines the meta-narrative text The Master of Petersburg, a novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, which has the figure of the author at the centre of its narrative structure. In his fictions, Coetzee is not shy of dislodging what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality effect’ in order to critically assert the role of the authorial figure; this is also to be seen in the novel Slow Man where Coetzee ruptures the realist texture of the narrative by introducing the figure of Elizabeth Costello who enters the text, as well as the life of Paul Rayment an amputee, as the author figure who is responsible for her creation i.e. Paul Rayment himself. At the same time Coetzee in order to explore the issues of writing at its ethical dimension, transforms some realist tropes at his disposal. For instance, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee with a brilliant manoeuvre plays on the trope of epistolary novels and presents the novel in a form of a series of lectures delivered by Elizabeth Costello, an Australian author of international fame. But in a brilliant ironical move, Coetzee through the performance of the authorial voice breaks the realist structure of the Novel. The paper will, however, primarily focus on the novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), which is a meta-narrative in which Coetzee actively interrogates the ethics of writing as in this novel he places the fictively re-imagined figure of Dostoevsky in Petersburg in late 1868, after the murder of his step-son Pavel. In this novel like his earlier novel Foe(1986), Coetzee examines the process of artistic creation and ethics involved in the event of writing, as Coetzee in his novel evokes a mix of historical factors and fictive characteristics which inspired and featured in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Through a close examination of the interstitial spaces between the two novels, this paper explores the figure of the author and its performance in postmodern fiction. The author as the figure has caused much debate in the postmodern fiction and narrative theory. Post Roland Barthes’s declaration ‘author is dead’ many deconstructionist and narrative theories have debated the relevance of author figure in fiction, and the meta-narrative and self-referential nature of postmodern literature make these debates even more potent. This paper seeks to explore the debate concerning the author figure from Bakhtin, Barthes, Bennet and Foucault and try to understand the implications which the author figure has in a postmodern text through a close examination of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.

Beyond Personal Tragedy and Psychic Wound: A Poetics of Pain and Suffering in J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

Beyond Personal Tragedy and Psychic Wound: A Poetics of Pain and Suffering in J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

Rewriting Dostoevsky: J. M. Coetzee’sThe Master of Petersburgand the perverted truths of biographical fiction

In The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of the Western novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, opening up a dialogue with the latter’s life and work. If many aspects of Dostoevsky’s life are recognizable, Coetzee deliberately departs from biographical fact in important regards. He also engages with well-known Dostoevskian narratives, in particular The Possessed, a censored section of which is reworked in his own novel. This article examines how The Master of Petersburg can be read not only as a reflection on biological and literary filiation, but also as a critique of censorship and as a meditation on writing conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public. Intimate though it may be, the act of writing is indeed likely to involve a betrayal of privacy — a necessary perversion of auto/biography seeking to achieve superior forms of truth through imaginative literature. This essay also argues that the conception of history Coetzee deploys may be influenced by his status as a postcolonial writer. Just as The Possessed was intended as an attack on those aiming for the radical destruction of old world orders and other historical legacies, so The Master of Petersburg can be approached as Coetzee’s own manifesto against nihilism and as a plea for a view of history as a transformative process — one that transcends binary oppositions in order to produce integrative discourses and epistemologies, instead of positing fathers against sons as foes in endless generational and colonial conflicts.

Роман Дж. М. Кутсі “Володар Петербурга” як фікційна біографія

The article concerns issues of the genre of fictional biography. The study examined the peculiarities of the artistic transformation of the circumstances of the F. M. Dostoyevsky's creative biography in J. M. Coetzee's novel “The Master of Petersburg”.The author has investigated a lot of intertextual sources as factors of the fictionalization of Dostoyevsky's biography, such as essays Stavrogin by Nikolai Berdyaev, Dostoevsky and patricide by Sigmund Freud, Dostoevsky – but in moderation by Thomas Mann, academic biographies of F. M. Dostoevsky and especially Dostoevsky’s novel Devils. An attempt was made to find out the motives of the author's appeal to the “dark” side of the inner world of Dostoevsky. The culminating episode of the novel, when Dostoevsky begins to write the novel Devils, is considered on three levels of the artistic system of the novel: 1) plot motivation; 2) characterological aspects; 3) conceptual level, determined by the problem of creativity as the central problem of the novel. Writer's work is mainly an irrational and intuitive sphere, Dionysian phenomenon, fraught with unpredictable consequences. So the author of the article tries to identify the “positive program” of the Coetzee's novel as a work about “darkness of human heart”, that is cleared by the artist's genius, but it does not protect against moral losses.

Two fictional journeys in the life of Dostoevsky: Typskin’s Summer in Baden–Baden and Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

This article explores two literary works based on the life of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky between the years 1867 and 1869: Лето в Бадене (Summer in Baden-Baden, 1982) by Leonid Tsypkin and The Master of Petersburg (1994) by J. M. Coetzee. Both novels endeavor to understand Dostoevsky. Their approaches are characteristic of late twentieth-century writing: the novelized life and travelogue, in which reality and fiction are interwoven. Both books recreate the life of Dostoevsky and the process by which he wrote The Gambler, The Possessed and The Idiot, based on Dostoevsky’s works and biographical sources. Each novel is framed by a question: Where does Dostoevsky’s writing come from? (Coetzee) and, What can account for this fascination with Dostoevsky? (Tsypkin). The comparative analysis offered here addresses the ways in which such fascination with the life and literary work of Dostoevsky is shaped, and examines the issue of Dostoevsky’s influence on these writers in line with Harold Bloom’s theory in The Anxiety of Influence.

The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice in Coetzee and Rilke

Abstract J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994) is a text about a father (Dostoevsky) mourning the death of his son. I am interested in the presence and meaning of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the novel, compared to the meaning of the myth in R. M. Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” (1904). I read the unaccomplished encounter between Orpheus and Eurydice as a story that portrays the failed intersubjectity plot of Coetzee’s novel(s). Following Blanchot’s reading of the myth, I examine the contrasting Orphean and Eurydicean conducts – Orpheus desiring but, at the same time, destroying the other and Eurydice declining the other’s approach. I argue that Orpheus’s and Eurydice’s contrasting behaviours can be looked at as manifestations of a failure of love, one for its violence, the other for its neglect, and thus the presence of the myth in The Master of Petersburg is meaningful in what it says about the theme of intersubjectivity in Coetzee’s oeuvre.

A Quest for the ‘New Man’ in Times of Transition: Faith, Unfaith and the Pitfalls of Utopia in JM Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

I offer a re-reading of JM Coetzee’s novel, The Master of Petersburg (1994), according to which I seek to answer the question: Why return to this particular novel today? In pursuing the question, I accord a greater directness than hitherto to both religious and political reference. My point is to locate the novel, both locally and internationally, in a current climate of religious-cum-political demagoguery and conviction. I argue that, in retrospect, we may appreciate Coetzee’s uncanny prescience: a vision that evokes the temper of the world today. Central to my analysis is the figure of the ‘new man’; forged in radicalised political times and treading a precarious path between faith and unfaith, utopia and delusion, revolutionary fervour and collective amnesia.

Encounters and Silence between Fathers and Sons: G. T. Didial and J. M. Coetzee

This artice seeks to demonstrate how Cabo Verdean author G. T. Didial’s O Estado Impenitente da Fragilidade and J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg revisit an ancient Western mythological tradition (Abraham and Isaac; Oedipus and Laius; Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents). I focus on and how, through a complex rewriting process, both narratives discuss not only the tense relationship between fathers and sons but also the complex relationship between contemporary literatures of post-colonial African cultural systems and the literatures of Western cultural systems

On the Violence and Insanity in J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

There are lots of description and narration in most of J.M. Coetzee’s novels. That is an unique perspective from which he represents the racism in Southern Africa. In The Master of Petersburg , Cotzee mixes up the history and illusion, and retells the life of Dostoevsky, alluding to the violent racial conflict in Southern Africa. The novel uncovers the myth of racism.

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

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.

Excess as Ek-stasis : Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and Giving Offense

Excess as Ek-stasisCoetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and Giving Offense Anthony Uhlmann This paper will develop a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994) alongside ideas that Coetzee develops in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, which was published in 1996 by the University of Chicago Press the year he began teaching as a visiting Professor at the Committee of Social Thought at Chicago. That elements of these two books might be related can be inferred from the overlap involved in the writing process of each (the first essay in Giving Offense appeared in print in 1988 and Coetzee worked on essays related to the book from then until 1996). The Master of Petersburg appeared after Age of Iron (1990) and was followed by Disgrace in 1999. It might be paired with Foe, which appeared in 1986, as a novel that explicitly engages with the work of another novelist: Daniel Defoe in Foe and Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg. This essay will consider how an understanding of excess that involves thinking outside of or beyond reason can be witnessed in both of these books. Excess will further be linked to related ideas of “offense” and “refraction” or “perversion”: each of these terms involves elements of “going beyond” an already given perspective in order to generate new meanings and new understandings of the “true.” These processes are revealed through a comparison of themes developed by Dostoevsky in “At Tikhon’s”—a chapter that was censored from the original published version of his novel Demons (see Dostoevsky, Demons 749–87), because it was considered perverse, offensive and excessive—and The Master of Petersburg, which enters into dialogue with it. As has been underlined by earlier critics and reviewers, The Master of Petersburg involves a pairing of Coetzee’s work with Dostoevsky’s novel Demons (which was published in earlier translations as The Possessed, The Devils), and the historical events related to the perversely violent Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechaev and the murder of his student follower Ivanov in 1869 (see Adelman, Attridge, Kossew, Lawlan, Popescu, Scanlan). In order to first get our bearings, it is necessary to establish the terms of relation between Dostoevsky’s novel and Coetzee’s novel, and the conceptual ideas, outlined in Giving Offense, that offer insight into the kind of thinking in excess of rational thought that Coetzee achieves in The Master of Petersburg. The main outlines of this relationship have now been well summarized by J. C. Kannemeyer in his recent biography of Coetzee, who sets out most of the [End Page 54] differences that I will recite again below. Kannemeyer also details the controversies that surrounded the reception of Coetzee’s novel, as critics including Dostoevsky’s biographer Joseph Frank lined up to heavily criticize what they perceived as his distortion of the facts, which are considered arbitrary falsifications (Skow, Frank), while others, including the distinguished critic James Wood, seemed to take offense at the manner in which the novel deals with Dostoevsky and his legacy, by unfavorably comparing Coetzee with Dostoevsky. One critic, Zinovy Zinik, even goes so far as to denounce the work as “an act of literary terrorism” (for an overview see Kannemeyer 461). Elements of Coetzee’s novel enter into dialogue with Dostoevsky’s Demons that also refers to historical events that concern Sergei Nechaev and his circle. Other elements, however, clearly diverge from both Dostoevsky’s novel and actual events. Coetzee’s story imagines Dostoevsky in 1869 returning in secret from financial exile in Dresden, where he was living with his young wife Anaya Snitkina, in order to bury his only son Pavel (who was in fact a stepson, adopted by Dostoevsky when he married his first wife Marya Isayeva in 1857). In Coetzee’s novel Pavel has been living under the name of his biological father Isaev, and Dostoevsky at first travels using Isaev’s papers to hide from his creditors who might have him detained should they become aware of his presence in the city. Pavel, in Coetzee’s story, has died mysteriously after a fall from a shot tower. He may have committed suicide, as the police maintain; he may...

J. M. Coetzee’s Spatial Narrative through Australia and Russia: Focus on Slow Man and The Master of Petersburg

J. M. Coetzee’s Spatial Narrative through Australia and Russia: Focus on Slow Man and The Master of Petersburg

Niepokój Sartre’a, trwoga Abrahama, pies Dostojewskiego. Od tragizmu wyboru do egzystencjalnej hermeneutyki oraz powieściowej „mądrości niepewności”

The main aim of this article is to discuss some common and tragic human fate, that is making the decisions in state of incertitude (of our real motivations as well as of further consequences of our choices), and especially natural human’s reactions to them, that is searching the hints how to proceed (inside us, from authority, from ‘the signs of the world’). The examples taken to analyse are: Biblical story of Abraham (Do I really hear the voice of God telling me to kill my son?), philosophical story of Sartre’s disciple (Should I join to the resistance or stay with my sick mother?), and literary story of Dostoyevsky, taken from J.M. Coetzee’s novel Master of Petersburg (How to refine the voice of revelation from the hum of world?). Philosophical considerations are connected with narrative analysis in order to not only describe human condition of incertitude but also observe how the medium of literature deals with it.

J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett

J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett

Abandoned Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel Form in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

In an often-quoted interview from 1990, J. M. Coetzee describes relation between his literary work and his life as in unexpectedly direct terms: Let me add ... that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by fact of suffering in world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are ludicrous against that being-overwhelmed, and, me, transparently (Doubling 248) Such a plain statement was all more surprising coming from a writer whose work was, at time of interview, routinely categorized as 'metafiction.' It is remarkable that this writer confesses that he is deeply affected by very thing his fictional work, on an ungenerous but far from uncommon reading, seemed unable confront directly: the fact of suffering in world. Coetzee's statement explicitly connects this affective experience his writings, which are not be taken as a failure acknowledge affect generated by fact of worldly suffering, but rather as so many against it; his fictions serve as a strategy contain overwhelm[ing] intensity of affect. Yet if they manage mitigate this intensity, they do not neutralize it completely: constructed by fiction are paltry, ludicrous. Coetzee's statement not only offers us a glimpse into affective economy propelling his fiction, it also obliquely registers a limitation of his early work; in this way, it anticipates several of trajectories that his work will explore after 1990. Coetzee describes his ambition convey an affective response suffering, yet he also subtly signals an awareness that his work has failed do so effectively when he notes that status of his fictions as paltry, ludicrous defenses is a fact, and to me [Coetzee], transparently so. This phrasing indicates that this understanding of his fiction is less transparent people other than author, as reception of his early work seems confirm. There are at least two suggestions embedded in this dense passage, both of which are instructive for an understanding of Coetzee's trajectory in last two decades: first, it announces Coetzee's exploration of different modes of writing that more successfully communicate affect of suffering, and second, it indicates that two of notions that will have be renegotiated in such a writing practice are 'authorship' and 'authority.' Coetzee's fiction in last two decades has returned time and again these two closely interlinked projects. The reconsideration of authorship and authority was already central in The Master of Petersburg, first novel he published after interview, and it directly implicated person of Coetzee himself in his three peculiar autobiographical fictions (Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime). And as David Attwell has noted, in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year, the practice of authorship itself' has become [t]he overriding subject (217); same can be said about his Nobel lecture, He and His Man. As for attempt convey a more direct affective response suffering, publication of Disgrace in 1999 seemed announce a shift a markedly more topical and realist register in its merciless depiction of life of a white man in a post-Apartheid South Africa that has totally erased terms of social contract that used pertain. The outspoken reactions its depiction of new race relationships, lingering xenophobia, and sexual abuse seemed signal that Coetzee, without abandoning his signature self-reflexivity, had finally managed convey and provoke an affective response reality of suffering which his work is committed. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Coetzee's twenty-first-century novels have not continued in this more realist vein. …

The Fathers’ Dark Triumph: terror and the end of revolution in J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

This paper interrogates the work performed by the figure of the terrorist in J.M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictionalised account of the events prompting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing of the novel Demons. It does so to illustrate the waning of the cultural signs of revolt and revolution in the ways that they were valorised by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The idea that writing is able to enact a revolt against the representational and epistemic violence of the symbolic order, is, I argue, one that Coetzee rejects. In denying writing revolutionary power, what emerges instead is the idea of art as itself terroristic: an act of violence rather than one of redemption.