Very feverish novel about, and completely in the line of the Russian writer Dostoevsky. Coetzee evokes a secret visit of the 49-year-old Dostoyevsky to Saint-Petersburg, after the death of his stepson Pavel. It is not clear to me what Coetzee had in view with this book: a tribute to the genius of Dostoyevsky (and at the same time, a portrait of his despair)? An attempt to dig even deeper into the human soul than the Russian grand master had already done? An exploration of the manipulation techniques that revolutionaries (here in the person of Nechaev) apply to other people, from their ideological glare? Or is it a therapeutic book, written after the death of Coetzee's own son? I fear that I do not know, but most probably it is all this at once. That makes it a very rich book, but I have to admit that I don't quite find it a real succes, being a bit too hermetically. Any way, it is a very atypical Coetzee, at least, very different from his earlier work.