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

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 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...