Parallel World

By John Skow

HERE'S A BRILLIANT, BROODING novel, a literary work of the first class, built around a confounding falsification by the author that reduces the entire book to the level of a clever and nearly meaningless stunt. Find an explanation if you can.

The situation in The Master of Petersburg (Viking; 250 pages; $21.95) is this: J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, has placed himself in the turbulent, ironic mind of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is 1869; the writer is 49, self-exiled in Dresden at mid-career, with Poor Folk and Crime and Punishment behind him and The Brothers Karamazov far in the future. He is a passionate, tormented idealist, still roiled by the Western liberal notions of social and political freedom that had swept the Russian intelligentsia a generation before. But the new, younger Russian intellectuals are not liberals; they are nihilists and anarchists, and Dostoyevsky is repelled and shaken. This ferment will result, two years later, in the towering "pamphlet-novel" variously called The Devils, The Possessed and (in a vigorous new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Demons -- the demons being the indigestible Western ideas that were unsettling Russia.

In Coetzee's darkly convincing narration, Dostoyevsky hears that his 21- year-old stepson Pavel Isaev, who has fallen in with nihilists in Petersburg, has been murdered, perhaps by the police or by his comrades. The writer travels to Petersburg, finds the rooming house where Pavel had lived and -- guilt-haunted because he did not get along well with this difficult son of his dead first wife -- moodily retraces the young man's last months. He tries to retrieve Pavel's papers from the police and is subjected to repeated, insinuating interrogations. He encounters a deadly, contemptuous young nihilist named Nechaev, who seems to live from child prostitution and who may have been Pavel's killer. Later, back in Pavel's rooming house, where he is staying, sleeping in Pavel's bed, wearing his stepson's unwashed clothes, Dostoyevsky begins to sketch the character who will be Nikolai Stavrogin, the world-hating, self-loathing young aristocrat who drives the action in Demons.

So Coetzee sums things up. But there are some facts the typical reader may not know that he ought to: in real life Dostoyevsky did not travel to Petersburg in 1869; he remained in Dresden. His stepson Pavel was not murdered by nihilists or anyone else. A pest and a spendthrift, he tormented the author all his life, and a standard scene from biographies has Pavel being forcibly kept from Dostoyevsky's deathbed. Nechaev did exist, and Dostoyevsky did transform him into a character in Demons, but the student his gang murdered in a celebrated crime was one Ivan Ivanov. Coetzee could hardly help knowing this, but not a word of preface or footnote explains that historical truth has been meddled with.

Was this phony central episode a justifiable aesthetic choice by Coetzee? Maybe; Dostoyevsky's wallowing guiltily in his murdered stepson's bed and then staggering off to write Demons is plausible, though facile. Does it cheat the reader? Only in part, by creating a distorted picture of one episode in the writer's life. But the matter leaves a bad taste. It's true that telling invented stories is what novelists do; but what of novels that are part history, that take their weight from the known stature of real people? Isn't the point to use fictional techniques to get the history right? If the novelist is fatally beguiled by some alternate reality, shouldn't he say so: "This is Dostoyevsky, but from a parallel universe in which Pavel got zapped by the bad guys"? As things are, Coetzee has demeaned his own novel, which (a Dostoyevskian ironist might observe) is a perversity worthy of Stavrogin.