The Master of Petersburg: A Novel

"This is one of the books that inspired me to write mine. In The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee basically creates a fictional version of Dostoevsky who goes to St Petersburg from his exile in Europe with Anna, because his stepson has died in mysterious circumstances. In real life, Dostoevsky did have a stepson who he didn’t get on particularly well with. They had a rocky relationship. So Coetzee’s created a sort of counterfactual, partly inspired – sadly – by his own son falling from an 11th-floor balcony. That plays into the emotional truth of this amazing novel, which also vividly evokes the atmosphere of the time – all these little alleyways and small courtyards where people are hanging out their laundry, the sights and sounds and smells of St Petersburg of the time. It’s a brilliant, atmospheric way of bringing this period to life. I think it’s very true to the atmosphere of Dostoevsky’s life, and the way he thought about St Petersburg. Admittedly it’s brave to veer completely off script and create a new version – it’s not a historical novel, it’s very much a fictional novel. And that kind of gave me permission to conceive of a book about Dostoevsky as something more creative than the trainlines set out in a conventional biography. It’s a good way to evoke the spirit of the times and to give people a rough sense of who the guy was. But the issue with fiction is that you don’t know which parts are faithful to historical events. Part of what I wanted to do was see if it was possible to write something both novelistic and true-to-life: are those impulses in fundamental conflict, or is it possible to create a synthesis? My book is an attempt to answer that question."