TMOP: Chap 5 pgs 29-31

[Bekah]

Thanks for introducing Rich,  and here I go.

Chapter 5 - "Maximov"
pages 29-31

  I will use D. to specify the fictional character and the full name,  
Dostoevsky, for the historical author.  I have put the narrative  
references in brackets and asterisked my comments.

********

[from the book - p 29:  D. shows up at the police department to  
collect Pavel's "letters and papers." ]

* Has anyone read Gogol's novel "Dead Souls" or play, "The General  
Inspector"?   I was briefly reminded of these tales satirizing  
Russian government bureaucracy of the mid 19th century (1840s - serfs  
were not emancipated).    They're quite funny - satires.    But TMOP  
is not funny.

[from the book - p 29: When asked who he is Dostoevsky replies that  
he is "Isaev, the father."]

* Isaev was Pavel's surname so between the name and "the father,"   
Dostoevsky is claiming Pavel as his natural son.

* Coetzee has explored parent child relationships in other novels,   
Disgrace (a daughter),  Life and Times of Michael K (a son to a  
mother) - also in Age of Iron which I own but haven't read.   
Elizabeth Costello has a grown son and daughter-in-law and there is a  
mother/daughter/son relationship explored in Slow Man.

* As has been mentioned,  Coetzee's son was killed in some kind of  
accident,  either auto or a fall from a balcony - when he was 23 -  
there were speculations of suicide).  This was shortly before to  
Coetzee's commencing work on TMOP.  And Dostoevsky lost an infant  
daughter in 1868 - he was devastated.  -

(The death is widely reported as being from a fall, sometimes even  
referencing a balcony,  but the auto accident is noted and sourced in  
Margaret Scanlon's "Incriminating Documents: Nechaev and Dostoevsky  
in J.M. Coetzee's 'The Master of Petersburg."  )

*  Pavel Isaev was indeed Dostoevsky's stepson left to him by his  
deceased mother,  but now Coetzee has Dostoevsky stepping into the  
shoes of Pavel's natural father.     So in this case,  D.,  the  
father,  takes the name of the son - the fictional author is stepping  
inside yet another character?  D. thought taking the name would  
simplify things to get ahold of the papers but it may have  
complicated obtaining them.   Another reason for the deceit may be  
the issue of D's gambling debts in Petersburg.  Or it could be a post- 
humus desire to be closer to the boy, to make amends for his last  
words and so on.  (I kind of go with expediency coupled with the debt  
issue - the intimacy issue doesn't really come up until later - but  
perhaps the name change stimulates this thinking,  at least in part.)

*************
[page 30:  D.  doesn't know if he should confess to the lie of his  
name or not. ]

*  Shades of Stavrogin who can't decide finally whether or not to  
confess to Tikon.  (See "At Tikon's" or "Stavrogin's Confessions."
http://dbanach.com/Woolf-Stavrogin.pdf   )


[ page 31:   D. apparently starts to have a seizure, perhaps brought  
on by the smell of paint, but pulls himself back just as he is called  
into the office of Councillor Maximov,  the "judicial investigator."  ]

* The smell of paint can bring on seizures.  Dostoevsky had his first  
seizure when his father died.   Freud speculated that Dostoevsky's  
epilepsy was non-organic,  psychological in origin, the product of  
hysteria and so on.  This has been discounted.  Dostoevsky most  
certainly had a form of organic epilepsy which can be brought on by  
external forces.

* It's been suggested that Myshkin,  Dostoevsky's  holy fool of "The  
Idiot,"  was written with epilepsy because Dostoevsky needed to  come  
to terms with his own condition.   Smerdyakov of The Brothers  
Karamazov was also an epileptic - the downside.

* Dostoevsky's second wife,  not Pavel's mother,  was very hard on  
Pavel about sponging and so on,  there are several letters to this  
effect which biographers have used in an attempt to show Pavel for  
what he was but they really shed some light on the otherwise oh, so  
tolerant woman.
http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/diagnosing- 
dostoyevskys-epilepsy/

Bekah