Tierras de propiedad colectiva de comunidades negras e indígenas

Coetzee establishes the “He” of the narrative with great care, the name of the main character being revealed only later in the narrative. After establishing the scene, Petersburg in October 1869, we first encounter the protagonist:

The passenger steps out. He is a man in late middle age, bearded and stooped, with a high forehead and heavy eyebrows that lend him an air of sober self-absorption. He wears a dark suit of somewhat démodé cut. (MOP 1)145

This can hardly be called an embodied character, rather resembling a brief sketch of the man we are to follow on his odyssey through Petersburg in search of an answer to the death of his stepson Pavel. The “air of sober self-absorption” befits the writer (as it would Coetzee); the old-fashioned “dark suit” sets up a contrast to the white suit of Pavel, which acquires symbolic importance in the course of the narrative.146 His first steps lead him to the former dwelling of his son, where he meets Matryona (whose name is revealed early on), “a girl with fair hair and striking dark eyes” (2), who leads him upstairs to the lodgings of her mother Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina (her full name is given), who has “the same dark eyes and sculpted eyebrows as the child, but her hair is black” (2). These observations are made in the vein of an external observer; no eye contact is made (or at least not reported). Coetzee continues to keep the reader in the dark about the protagonist’s name, even when he introduces himself: “‘Forgive me for coming unannounced,’ he says. ‘My name…’ He hesitates. ‘I believe my son has been a lodger of yours.’” (2) Dostoevsky presents himself in his function as “the father of,” omitting his own name. Only much later will his actual name be revealed to the reader by councillor Maximov. (33) Showing the mother and the girl a

145 _{Coetzee 1999 [1994]. All quotes in section 3.3 will be from MOP unless indicated otherwise.}

146 _{The dark suit of the father and the white suit of the son could be connected to Plato’s theory of the passions:} the white horse representing the rational and moral instincts, the dark horse representing irrational instincts, i.e. dark desires (Phaedrus 246e-254e, in Plato 1925).

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daguerreotype of the son, the child whispers his name: Pavel Alexandrovich; almost as if she was calling out to the dead Pavel in an orphic gesture of resurrection. Pavel constitutes the epicentre of this narrative, and all events unfold around his unsolved death by falling from a shot tower.147 Dostoevsky suspects murder and follows a trail to the revolutionary and nihilist Nechaev, modelled after a historical figure (who the historical Dostoevsky never met).148

Left alone in the room formerly occupied by his son, he first tries to catch a scent of his son from the pillow, “but he can smell nothing but soap and sun.” (3) He attempts to evoke the physical presence of the son. He opens the son’s suitcase, that is among the few things remaining of him, to find a white cotton suit, to which he presses his forehead (where his mirror neurons are located): “Faintly the smell of his son comes to him. He breathes in deeply, again and again, thinking: his ghost, entering me.” (3f) We as readers stand by to witness the father employing his sympathetic imagination to call forth the spirit of his dead son, here represented by the embodied expression of a “faint smell” – imagine mirror neurons firing away after being activated by a smell that triggers a neurological representation (spirit image) of the son.

Pavel represents the other Dostoevsky is trying to approximate, is trying to connect to. The text continuously evokes Pavel’s presence in the mind of the aging author, gyrates around his repeated attempts to reach out beyond death to his lost son. Dostoevsky waits “for the darkness to thicken, to turn into another kind of darkness, a darkness of presence. Silently he forms his lips over his son’s name, three times, four times.” (5) Unlike Orpheus, of whose journey into the realm of death he is reminded, he has no music to appease the spirits, but only words, boiling down to the calling of his dead son’s name: Pavel. At this moment “[h]is head begins to swim” (5) and he falls asleep, imagining “himself plunging down a long waterfall into a pool, and gives himself over to the plunge.” (6) With these words the first chapter, simply titled “Petersburg,” ends.149

147 _{A “shot tower” was used to make ammunition. Herein lies the probably most suggestive parallel to the death} of Coetzee’s son Nicholas, who fell from a balcony; Coetzee’s grief remains his own, but the dimension it takes on in his fiction about the Russian writer is made available to the reader and thereby transcends the private, as expressed by Dostoevsky to councillor Maximov: “A private matter, an utterly private matter, private to the writer, till it is given to the world.” (40) For a highly original discussion see Lawlan 1998.

148 _{In an interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee sublimely comments: “The death of Pavel brings Dostoevsky face} to face with Nechaev, which is something that didn’t happen in real life, so to that extent it allows me to engineer a meeting between two very important historical figures.” (Scott 1997: 100)

149 _{This is the first novel where Coetzee uses titled chapters, maybe as a homily to the author Dostoevsky. The} formal use of chapter titles otherwise recurs only in the essay fiction Elizabeth Costello.

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