Volume 41, Number 19 · November 17, 1994
Doubles
By John Bayley
The Master of Petersburg
by J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 250 pp., $21.95
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews
by J. M. Coetzee, edited by David Attwell
Harvard University Press, 448 pp., $45.00; $19.95 (paper)
Demons
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear, by Larissa Volokhonsky
Knopf, 733 pp., $27.50
A year or so ago, talking to the leading contenders for a prestigious new fiction prize awarded in Moscow, I was struck by the wry defeatism displayed by writers who had been the most successful. One of them remarked: 'We Russian novelists cannot do without the tyranny of history any more than Dostoevsky could do without God. And we haven't learnt the Western trick of being interested in individuals for their own sake.' I said I thought Western novelists were no longer much interested in individuals for their own sake, and added that Tolstoy had surely been the grand master of this particular literary field. He agreed, but said that Tolstoy was of no possible use now to a Russian writer, as the weakness of Solzhenitsyn's recent work had so clearly demonstrated; and, moreover, that both he and Tolstoy had relied on Russian history to the point of identifying the novel with it. Without the total domination of the first the second could not exist.
Review, 2933 words
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