Master of Petersburg

<b><b>J.M. Coetzee's latest novel <i>The Schooldays of Jesus</i> is now available from Viking. <i>Late Essays: 2006-2016</i> will be available January 2018. </b></b> <p/>In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky lately a resident of Germany is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson Pavel. Half crazed with grief stricken by epileptic seizures and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost--and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy--Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating compassionate and cruel pious and unspeakably perverse.