ABSTRACT
Everything I have so far said about possession seems to come together in a single, everyday moment portrayed in a remarkable passage of J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, his fictional imagining of the life of Dostoevsky. In these few pages on the great Russian novelist of demonic experience from perhaps our most valued contemporary novelist, possession is as agonised as it is in Donne, ambivalent as it is in Lear, and ecstatic as it is in Lead. But it is also as ordinary as you can imagine. I have wanted throughout this book to suggest that the demonic is not some sick and removed thing but has a bearing on all experience. Coetzee reveals that the perils and promise of possession are very present in life at its most humdrum. By attaching the name Dostoevsky to such experience Coetzee insists on its moral and spiritual importance. In The Master of Petersburg, the subjectivity of subjection is our ineluctable condition and at the same time our vocation and our task. It is impossible, or it should be – as it is not with the more extreme experience of Leda, Poor Tom and Surin – to stand aloof from this, so ordinary is the scene, and so resonant. In an effort to bring out its power of familiarity, I will not disguise my own involvement in what follows.
