The Master of Petersburg

J. M. Coetzee · b. 1940 · South Africa / Australia

Why it matters

Dostoevsky returns to Petersburg to claim his dead stepson's belongings and finds himself drawn into the same revolutionary underground his own fiction indicted. Coetzee imagines the master novelist from the inside, grief curdling into the moral extremity he wrote about.

At a glance

A brooding imagined interiority for a real historical figure, thick with Dostoevskian argument and dread.