TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters

[Mark Kohut]

In his most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee asks a wonderfully
poignant question about later Tolstoy: everyone thinks the fiction is not his best because it is too preachy, telling not showing. The writer character---NOT COETZEE exactly, as Dostoevsky is NOT EXACTLY the real Dostoevsky--asks: But what was that late "fiction' of Tolstoy's like WITHIN Tolstoy's mind.?..... 

--- On Mon, 9/22/08, Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters
> To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>, "Richard Fiero" <rfiero at gmail.com>
> Date: Monday, September 22, 2008, 5:12 AM
> That's a good point, Richard, and I believe that Coetzee
> is leading is us towards a view of HIS Dostoevsky as a
> character in one DOSTOEVSKY's own novels.  In other
> words, it's as though Coetzee asked the question -
> "What if Dostoevsky had been the protagonist of one his
> own novels?  What would that novel have been like?" 
> Which is why TMoP reads so much like a loving pastiche of a
> Dostoevsky novel, especially in certain places.
> 
> One of the things that Coetzee seems to be doing is going
> back to the old saw about each person's life being the
> novel he or she is writing and taking it one step further by
> posing, in Dostoevsky's case, the question: "What
> if he had been his own character?"  It's the kind
> of more-than-merely-clever literary trick
> (more-than-merely-clever, that is, if a writer can actually
> pull it off) that makes Coetzee emphatically post-modern,
> despite his seemingly earnest and somewhat old fashioned
> high style.
> 
> --- On Mon, 9/22/08, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > From: Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters
> > To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Date: Monday, September 22, 2008, 1:59 AM
> > Richard Ryan wrote:
> > >By the end of Chapter One ("Petersburg")
> of
> > The Master of 
> > >Petersburg, we've met the four of the
> characters
> > who will be crucial 
> > >to this story - namely:
> > >
> > >. . . For those who know the details of the
> historical
> > Dostoevsky's 
> > >biography, Coetzee immediately begins leaving
> clues
> > that the novel's 
> > >Dostoevsky is emphatically NOT to be identified
> with
> > his "real 
> > >world" counterpart. . .
> > 
> > I'm confused. Certainly the Dostoevsky of TMoP is
> as
> > alienated as any 
> > of the real world Dostoevsky's characters and in
> the
> > very same 
> > ways.  Difference that I can see is that TMoP is not a
> > tragedy since 
> > the main character is renewed through art.