The Master of Petersburg

The Master of Petersburg (1994) marks a turning point in Coetzee's career. Published in the year of the first multiracial elections in South Africa, it is composed in the run-up to the final demise of apartheid, in the final phase of interregnum, following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the unbanning of the ANC in 1990. Written at this historical juncture of transition, it is in many ways Janus-faced. Its deliberations about revolutionary activities evoke many of the contemporaneous political concerns in a South Africa faced by the prospect of being ruled by a party headed (for obvious reasons) by revolutionary leaders rather than practised politicians. In this sense, the novel achieves some of the political relevance and urgency felt in Age of Iron. But the setting is nineteenth-century Russia, which signals a clear opening-out of the novel's concerns. It builds on earlier work in another way, by developing the theme of authorship and canonicity, previously expounded most comprehensively in Foe, and in such a way as to achieve a kind of punctuation point in Coetzee's oeuvre. The question of authorship is agonized over in later novels; but the complex metafictional treatment it receives here represents an extreme turning-inwards, and a kind of final statement. Ultimately, this seems to be Coetzee's darkest, and most difficult novel.

The problems about authorship and responsibility explored in The Master of Petersburg derive from problems in Dostoevsky's poetics, and the protagonist of the novel is Fyodor Dostoevsky himself.