In The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of the Western novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, opening up a dialogue with the latter’s life and work. If many aspects of Dostoevsky’s life are recognizable, Coetzee deliberately departs from biographical fact in important regards. He also engages with well-known Dostoevskian narratives, in particular The Possessed, a censored section of which is reworked in his own novel. This article examines how The Master of Petersburg can be read not only as a reflection on biological and literary filiation, but also as a critique of censorship and as a meditation on writing conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public. Intimate though it may be, the act of writing is indeed likely to involve a betrayal of privacy — a necessary perversion of auto/biography seeking to achieve superior forms of truth through imaginative literature. This essay also argues that the conception of history Coetzee deploys may be influenced by his status as a postcolonial writer. Just as The Possessed was intended as an attack on those aiming for the radical destruction of old world orders and other historical legacies, so The Master of Petersburg can be approached as Coetzee’s own manifesto against nihilism and as a plea for a view of history as a transformative process — one that transcends binary oppositions in order to produce integrative discourses and epistemologies, instead of positing fathers against sons as foes in endless generational and colonial conflicts.

2 and knowledge, from the field of art and architecture, where the newly discovered laws of perspective were put into practice, to that of philosophy, where the notion of linearity became synonymous with ideas of rationality, clarity, order, rectitude, predictability, transparency and simplicity: the straight line, like other products of human design, is hailed as the symbol of modernity. Given the long presence of linearity in the dominant European discourse, it is no wonder that Western civilisations have come to regard the non-linear as heretic and to reject associated concepts such as irrationality, confusion, disorder, indiscipline, random, chaos and any kind of meandering complexity.Logically enough, the history of European town planning mirrors these evolutions. As soon as man opted for a settled way of life, he endeavoured to domesticate space but it is not until the Antiquity that this taming gesture begins to bear the marks of the straight line and related geometric forms like "the Golden Rectangle": 3 the legendary city of Athens, for instance, was characterised by its monumental and symmetrical buildings, although these succeed in striking a balance with the surrounding natural --and untidier --landscape; as to Roman cities, they were made of assembled rectangular blocks, which was very much in line with the military spirit that prevailed at the time.

SEPC (Société d'études des pays du Commonwealth)