Influence of the Russian literature influence of Russian literature on J. M. Coetzee's concept of autobiography

The paper analyzes various aspects of self-reflexiveness of Coetzee's prose with a special emphasis upon his concepts of autobiography and confession as revealed in his pivotal essay “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky” and his own commentaries to it in the book «Doubling the Point. Essays and Interviews» (1992). A brief outline of Coetzee's later autobiographical prose can be found in this book, with explanation of his concept of autobiography, which includes for Coetzee the whole body of an author's written works; the term autre biography is introduced, clarifying the apparent paradoxicality of the writer's autobiographical Er-Erzählung. Coetzee is crucially concerned with how to achieve the end of confession, how to put an end to the endless game of deception and self-deception. For Coetzee, philosophical power of Russian writers, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is connected with their being “heirs of a Christian tradition more vital, in some respects, than Western Christianity”. Tolstoy's “The Kreutzer Sonata” is analyzed as a text potentially rich in interpretations, the author consciously reducing them to a single authoritative truth. It is achieved by depriving the text of any self-reflexiveness and silencing the moments of crucial importance - as opposed to Tolstoy's “A Confession and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, where heroes confront death - the experience revealing some final truth to them. Analyzing “Notes from Underground”, “The Idiot” and the chapter “At Tikhon's” excluded from “The Possessed”, Coetzee infers that for Dostoevsky “true confession does not come from the sterile monologue of the self or from the dialogue of the self with its own self-doubt, but from faith and grace”. Thus, for Coetzee Russian literature is an important source of self-interrogation not only about the possibility for a subject to be expressed in words and to find the final truth about oneself, but also about the limits of postmodern paradigm which can be transcended by the final truth of faith and “charity which is the way in which grace allegorizes itself in the world”.