EN
The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that John Maxwell Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K can be perceived as a parody of Voltaire’s Candide, a novel intended as a ridicule of Leibniz’s Theodicy. While Voltaire proposed to withdraw from the world and ‘‘to cultivate one’s own garden” as a remedy to Leibniz’s ill-conceived optimism, Coetzee shows that Voltaire’s praise of passivity and life in accordance with nature, symbolized by a retreat into gardening, is as erratic as Leibniz’s philosophy. The essay concludes that Coetzee’s Michael K can be treated as a caricature of Voltaire’s Candide.