In An Interview With David Attwell in the early nineties, J. M. Coetzee lamented not having the “badge of honor” of having had a book banned under the repressive apartheid censorship regime, which at that point was nearing the end of a forty-year reign. In the same interview, he suggests that “the intensity, the pointedness, the seriousness of Russian writing from the time of Nicholas I is in part a reflection of the fact that every word published represented a risk taken” (DP, 299). Playing down the power of South African censorship to thwart the circulation of texts that had been published abroad, he nonetheless notes its “uglier, deforming side effects”: “The very fact that certain topics are forbidden creates an unnatural concentration upon them” (DP, 300). Indeed, while rejecting the “stupidity” of censorship and advocating its abolition, he speculates about what the absence of boundaries might mean: “in an abstract way I think there ought to be bounds to what is licit, if only as a way of making it possible to be transgressive” (DP, 298–99). These comments were made as the settlement that would lead to the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994 was being negotiated. While the new state would clearly bring into being new boundaries of acceptability, Coetzee’s comments raise questions about the relationship between transgression and risk in the postapartheid state.

In a series of essays published between 1988 and 1993, and collected in Giving Offense (1996), Coetzee focuses on the “uglier, deforming side effects” of censorship. He suggests that censorship affects the writing process as well as the material dissemination of texts, opening the possibility that all writing produced under censorship may bear traces of the encounter with those most forensic of readers, as the censor may be “repudiated with visceral intensity but never wholly expelled” (GO, 10). Here I will take up this idea in Coetzee’s first postapartheid novel, The Master of Petersburg (1994). Written as the threat of censorship in South Africa dissipated, the novel provides a fictional account of the period in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky when he was writing The Possessed. Famously subject to censorship by Dostoevsky’s editor, The Possessed is now published with the excised chapter “At Tikhon’s” included as an appendix; Coetzee’s novel culminates in the writing of what appears to be an early draft of the chapter.