Michael Kochin wrote a chapter in the 2013 book, Dostoevsky’s Political Thought:
The writer must give up his soul in order to write. He must give up his soul to become the body writing.
To write Stavrogin, then, the writer must be open to possession; he must be willing to be seduced by the loss of personality necessary to produce writing that is of other than personal value. The moral danger for the writer-for the writer writing with the body-is this possession. Stavrogin, after all, is not a writer, but he is a rapist. Pyotr/Nechaev is not a writer, but he is a murderer. To write the possessed, the writer himself must allow his body to be possessed by their demons. He cannot appease these demons with mere blood-as we have seen, the writer must “give up his soul.”
Both novels show us this close relation between literature and the extreme mistreatment of bodies at the hands of governments, terrorists, criminals, the self, and demons. Coetzee’s Nechaev recognizes this, saying to Dostoevsky in a dripping cellar with two hungry children feeding on a loaf of bread earned by their streetwalker mother: “I suppose you want to hurry home and get this cellar and these children down in a notebook before the memory fades.” The suffering of children, he recognizes, is precisely the sort of thing that motivates the writer. Suffering children, like the budding breasts of the young girl Matryona, inspire the writer, that is, both suffering and erotic passion open the writer to possession by demonic spirits. Suffering offers the writer the occasion for indulging the transgressive pleasure of possession. Suffering, or its Latin equivalent, passion, licenses the writer to divest himself of the controlling subjectivity of his non-writer self.
The possession invoked by the spectacle of suffering can motivate the writer and the reader to suffer with the suffering-it can instill compassion. Yet the spectacle of suffering can also move the writer and the reader to revel in the delight in his own power felt by the deliberate perpetrator of suffering. Indeed, the writer thus can present us with the torturer as clearly as he or she can present us with the tortured. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky knows well and puts to work in writing Stavrogin’s confession that there is generally more “real life” in fictional rapists than in fictional victims.62 The question that remains is whether U1e writing itself is conducive to the alleviation of this suffering, or whether it merely affords the reader a view of the spectacle of that suffering from a safe aesthetic distance. Faced with a choice between vitality and morals, every writer will choose vitality-and every serious man will choose morality. One would like to believe that the writer suffers with his victims, and thus his art encourages the serious reader to get out of his easy chair and act to alleviate human suffering. But the real Dostoevsky wrote Stavrogin’s confession, and the real J. M. Coetzee wrote The Master of Petersburg.
