num_pages: 256
description: In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost—and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy—Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.
language: English
title: The Master of Petersburg
titlecomplete: The Master of Petersburg
genres: 20th Century, Russia, Historical Fiction, Nobel Prize, Africa, South Africa, Novels, Literature, Fiction, African Literature
ratings_count: 3732
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Irish Times International Fiction Prize, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Commonwealth Writers' Prize
category: Best Book in Africa
publisher: Penguin Books