TMoP, Chapter 20, The End

[Lawrence Bryan]

Stavrogin, the last chapter, is a difficult one for me. The title is  
the name of the main character in a novel, "Devils", the fictional D  
has not yet written, but which Dostoyevsky did write shortly after the  
time period in TMoP. At first glance one sees D's thoughts on Nechaev  
morphing into the fictional Stavrogin, but this seems all too glib.

The author Coetzee is the creator of the fictional D writing as though  
he is the real Dostoyevsky writing about the real Nechaev in the  
fictional character Stavrogin who doesn't appear at all in Coetzee  
except as a chapter title.

"Nothing he says is true, nothing is false, nothing is to be trusted,  
nothing to be dismissed." . . . "Perversion: everything and everyone  
to be turned to another use, to be gripped to him and fall with  
him." (p. 235)

As Petersburg burns, D sits at his writing desk trying to start to  
write. He wrestles with ideas, what to write, a stream of  
consciousness, follows: God, blasphemy, Pavel, fathers and sons at war  
with each other, God as the father to D who is father to Pavel and  
also father to what D writes, until finally, he starts to write.

I can continue to summarize Coetzee's last chapter, but for me it is a  
mystery which a summary will not unravel.

Perhaps someone else here can shed more light on this ending.

In doing a bit of research I came across the following and copied the  
last paragraph.

Title: Incriminating documents: Nechaev and Dostoevsky in J.M.  
Coetzee's 'The Master of Petersburg.' (Sergei Nechaev, Fyodor  
Dostoevsky)
Author: Margaret Scanlan
Publication: Philological Quarterly (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1997
Publisher: University of Iowa
Volume: v76    Issue: n4    Page: p463(15)



The violence Coetzee's Dostoevsky recognizes in himself, and in terms  
of which he understands the process of artistic creation as  
plagiarism, appropriation, and perversion, is always visible in this  
novel, not least in the contrast between this fictional character and  
what we know about his historical counterpart. In real life, Pavel  
Isaev did not die young, and his stepfather's generosity to him  
through his own years of poverty is one of his most redeeming  
qualities. There is, apparently, little reason to believe the old  
gossip about Dostoevsky and child prostitutes, and it is patently  
unfair to conflate an author with his own characters as Coetzee does  
when, omitting references to Dostoevsky's career as the editor of an  
influential journal or to his numerous family, he makes him out to be  
as febrile and isolated as Raskolnikov. But this unfairness, this  
incompatibility between the text of history and the text of fiction,  
is of course Coetzee's point. He is not out to "correct" the  
historical record, replacing it with a more accurate version; in the  
best postmodern way, he shows us the gaps and distortions in the  
received version without trying to conceal the problems of his own.  
But Coetzee shares little of the often alleged playfulness of the  
deconstructive view. His Dostoevsky slinks off in the night,  
meditating on the silence of God, which persists in spite of the  
betrayals by which he had tried to end it. He is more than a little  
stagy and melodramatic, this guilt-ridden genius, but he is also  
powerful image of the failure of a romantic view of literature, a  
great writer who can finally neither transcend history nor shape it to  
his liking.

Lawrence, glad to go on to something else.
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