The Master of Petersburg
In the autumn of 1869 a novelist travels back into St Petersburg on a false passport to collect the effects of his stepson, dead in a fall from a shot tower, and takes over the room the young man had rented. The police hold the papers and will not give them up; the landlady has a daughter who watched the boy come and go, and a young revolutionary who knew him begins making demands. Coetzee puts Dostoevsky inside a grief the record does not contain and lets the writing of Demons grow out of it.
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