Rating: 
Summary: Well-worth your time.
Review: A father travels to Petersburg upon learning of the death of his beloved stepson, Pavel. There he resides in his son's apartment for what he intends to be a time of remembrance and vigilance. Yet, before he can even begin this time of healing, he is spun into a web of unknowns and deception. The police, who are keeping some of Pavel's personal papers, say that he killed himself while the social group to which he belonged believe he was murdered. Add to all this confusion a landlady whom the father finds himself totally taken by and you have The Master of Petersburg. Coetzee's writing is, as usual, superior. He has the ability to draw in the reader and then keep him there wanting to better understand the feelings of the protagonist and the forces that surround him. I think Coetzee is one of the best-kept secrets in the entire literary world. Although he may have won many a prize, the typical reader is not familiar with his name or his works.
Rating: 
Summary: Rather difficult to read
Review: After the death of his stepson Pavel Isajev, Fjodor Dostojevski returns to St. Petersburg to say farewell and to find out the true cause of his death. He meets Pavel's landlady and her unpleasant daughter and he also finds out that things are not the way they seem to be: Pavel's death (he had fallen to his death) is less clear than it appears. Fjodor finds out that Pavel was part of the entourage of the vague, anarchistic Netsjajev, who now also wants to use Dostojevski. The police suspects this and sends a police spy who is dressed as a beggar to see what Dostojevski is doing while in St. Petersburg. And in the meantime Dostojevski has to come to terms with the unexpected death of a son that he loved dearly, but that did not love his stepfather in return.
I read the book while in St. Petersburg and the Russian atmosphere is very well described, but all the main characters, side characters and psychological twists and turns do not make this book very easy to read.
Rating:
Summary: Dostoevsky's heroes manifest in the form of allusion
Review: Coetzee audaciously imagines the life of Dostoevsky in THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG. Unlike Leonid Tsypkin's SUMMER IN BADEN BADEN, a novel whose verisimilitude lends an amazing accuracy to that of a documentary, Coetzee's is a pure fantasy of the great 19th century Russian novelist. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, the novel is at once a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination. Dostoevsky under Coetzee's hand obsessively followed his stepson's spirit, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim and whether he loved or despised his stepfather.
Coetzee deftly works up a mystery of the death of Pavel Alexandrovich and a haunting quasi-appearance of the dead from page one. Dostoevsky breathed in deeply, again and again, mentally begging his stepson's ghost to enter him. His grief for Pavel's death was poignant that being alive to him was like, at the moment, a kind of nausea, a desire to be extinguished and annihilated. Since the news came of the death, something had been ebbing out of him as if he was the one being dead: he died but his death failed to arrive.
No sooner had Dostoevsky convinced of his stepson's suicide did a seditionist belonging to the People's Vengeance unveil the truth about Pavel's death. Among Pavel's belongings was a piece of paper with a list of people to be assassinated. In the name of the sedition group, Pavel (who had yet murdered anyone) was to carry out the assassination as soon as signal was given. The assassinations were meant to precipitate a general uprising and to lead to the overthrow of the state. Did Pavel fear of the consequences, or did the People's Vengeance find him to be traitor and execute him?
As Dostoevsky sidled to the heart of the matter, Pavel's death and his left-behind diary revealed a national crisis: one that was redolent of the hideous face of hunger, sickness, and poverty. These were the ways in which real forces manifest themselves in the world. The forces had the origins in the centers of power. Pavel allegedly wrote, distributed subversive pamphlets and was believed to be murdered. Like the People's Vengeance, Pavel could have simply merged with the invisible people of the city and with the conditions that produced him, became underground man who chose to alienate from the hostility of the world. His death, therefore, became the underground group's bait to lure Dostoevsky from Dresden to St. Petersburg so he could write stories of people oppressed by the regime. In a way, Pavel was sacrificed for the cause of revolution, nothing short of martyrdom. But Dostoevsky did not understand how or for whom Pavel was sacrificed nor was he moved by the group's bitterness toward Russia.
The ingenuity of THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG lies in Cozetee's mindful association of the fantasized entities in his novel to Dostoevsky and his heroes, especially Raskolnikov, the underground man, and even Ivan Karamazov. These heroes from Dostoevsky's classics manifest in the form of a distant allusion in Cozetee's work, trickling into Cozetee's lines through a suggestiveness and pervasiveness. The seditionist fantasized a sort of re-creation, a new mindset and way of thinking almost as radical to that of Raskolnikov, who positioned himself on the same level as God and contrived to re-order the world and transcended his conscience. In other way the group resembled the underground man, as the group no longer acted in the name of ideas but in accord to the extreme of senses. It is through the tempestuous political backdrop Dostoevsky embarked on a journey to discovery of the relationship between father and son.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting fictional look at the life of Fyodor Dosoyevsky.
Review: Coetzee bravely takes a snippet of Dostoevsky's life and creates his tale; a story of pain, loss, and love. In the novel, Dostoevsky returns to Petersburg after the death of his stepson. He soon learns that his stepson's death was not accidental, as he believed. What I found interesting about this book, however, is Coetzee's attempt to show the circumstances that might have led to Dostoevsky's writing of _Crime and Punishment_, and some of his other works. Throughout his novel are little gems of rare beauty that fans of D.'s novels will recognize. There is a character that will become the prototype of the inspector in _Crime and Punishment_, as well as the splendid setting of Petersburg that is so richly explored in C&P. Also, D.'s stepson might have been the inspiration for the brooding Raskolnikov of C&P. In all, it is an excellent look at the thoughts and emotions that might run through an author's mind before they find release in the pages of a manuscript. Coetzee's book is dark, brooding, and troubling, but then, how else could a book about Dostoesvsky be?
Rating:
Summary: Correction on a previous review
Review: Coetzee's novel is set after the publication of Crime and Punishment (certain characters even reference the novel, and its protagonist by name). A previous reviewer was mistaken, how I dont know, it is explicitly clear. If he had read "The Devils" he would recognize "the prototypes" are meant for that novel,(and to some extent "The Brothers Karamazov") not Crime and Punishment. This is not a novel for those with limited comprehension. Excellent novel by the way. All Coetzee's books are worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Not the best of Coetzee's novels, but a good read
Review: Dostoevsky and Coetzee readers might find this novel interesting. It seems that Coetzee and Dostoevsky have the same temperaments as writers, that both explore the same crevices of the human psyche. However, I'm not too sure whether Coetzee succeeds in interpreting Dostoevsky's frame of mind between 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov.' In some passages, the novel becomes too obscure to follow, and perhaps someone with a better knowledge of both Dostoevsky's life and his novels might understand what Coetzee is trying to get at in them. In this sense, 'The Master of Petersburg' doesn't stand on its own. But Coetzee's favorite fiction themes--isolated suffering, glimpses of madness, rivalries between family members, revenge, oppression by the known and unknown, the burdens of empathy--are abundantly represented in the novel, and the tension he creates at some moments through his language and images is truly enviable. I definitively recommend this book to those interested in Coetzee's ideas.
Rating:
Summary: My first Coetzee book, and I loved it
Review: I must say that the present tense of the book was shocking for me. It seemed to drive me relentlessly onto the next page and then the next....
While certainly, some of the facts aren't truly historical or necessarily accurate, that doesn't really affect the nature of the story. This book isn't concerned with being totally accurate in the details. It is the voyage that Dostoevsky makes internally from his initial knowledge of his step-sons death to his ability to release all the emotions, pain, fears etc associated with it.
This is about Dostoevsky (and maybe authors in general). It isnt about "the facts."
Anyway, I thought it was great. I look forward to reading more...
Rating:
Summary: the gray area between fact and fiction
Review: The novel imagines Dostoevsky's life between the the publication of Crime and Punishment and before he began writing The Brothers Karamazov. It is a meditation on pain, loss, and love, as Dostoevsky's stepson, Pavel, has died. He tries obsessively to reclaim some of this boy's past by renting the room he once lived in and conversing with the people who knew Pavel to ascertain whether he committed suicide or was a victim of murder. Coetzee's style in this novel is much like Dostoevsky's. There is a lot of inner monologue and the thoughts and anguish of the characters are always known. It makes you think about the similarities and differences between the characters an author writes about and the life of the author himself. Coetzee seems to say that they are almost impossible to distinguish from each other and I will agree to some extent, although I was distracted somewhat by this extreme portrayal. Overall, a nice glimpse into the life of Dostoevsky (though I found it akward that Coetzee changed the year of Pavel's death) and the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia.
Rating: 
Summary: Dostoevsky v. Nechaev
Review: This novel is a contradiction in terms.
The confrontation between Nechaev (the author of the 'Revolutionary's Catechism'), his disciple Pavel and the writer Dostoevsky, Pavel's stepfather, is an essential one. It's the eternal problem of, in the words of Jorge Semprun - L'ecriture ou la Vie -, writing (reflection, literature) or living (action, politics). In the beginning, Nechaev is portrayed as a fundamentalist, an anarchist full of hatred, who curses the intellectuals, because they don't eliminate the old way of thinking.
But at the end, Pavel (his follower) is considered as a martyr for a just cause ('he gave himself up for the future').
Dostoevsky, on the contrary, ends as a writer of 'perversions of the truth' and as an ink-slinger, 'who receives lots of money for writing books in return for his soul'.
So, the winner of the confrontation is Nechaev, the pure and revolutionary politician, against perhaps (and for me) the greatest writer of all times. In our world, we need the two of them, philosophers and experimenters, and the latter are mostly influenced by the former, otherwise their experiments are hot air.
Also, the case of Dostoevsky is a special one, because he had to write (and to gamble) in order to try to reimburse the debt he inherited from his family. Apart from this controversy, the novel contains some weaknesses. The parricide theme is flawed, because Pavel is a stepson. There are also some melodramatic passages (e.g. Matryona: 'I would like to have a child with you'). This novel is certainly not an easy text. But, even if I don't agree with its basic thesis, I must recommend it, because it treats fundamental questions and it forces the reader at least to reflect upon them.
Rating:
Summary: Poesy...
Review: Very often, when we let our pen wander trough empty paper sheets, when we let it have his own free will, and when the dark ink starts to pour itself in spasmic bursts on that paper, in that moment, great works of art are being made, those works that came from heart.
It does not matter wheter it is the pen, brush, hammer, or a pice of wire, greatness of love that emerges from mere act of creation, marks, with undeletable scent, a newborn baby... and very often, that baby pulls along with him new generations of the epoch.
Master of Petersburg is one such baby. Written in a dash of brilliance, written from the heart. It does not matter that no one can adequately present the inside universe of the great man like Dostoyevski, Coetzee's Dostoyevski is his trusty image. Without greatness and mistique which is invoked by the title 'great', Dostoyevski is just another on of the "poor men", obsessed with memory, posessive love for his foster child, in the same time categorically refusing to accept his son's world, young, revolutionary Russia, thinking that those kind of times are long gone (1848)...
It is a wonderful book, which, unfortunatelly will not present itself in a histories of literature as a great work, but will indoubtley present itself as a great work in a hearts of a reader...
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