Writing Justice:Fiction and Literary Lawyers in Late Imperial Russia, 1864-1900.

19th Century Russian Literature;Law and Literature;19th Century Russian History;Literary Lawyers;The Judicial Reform of 1864;Russia;Dostoevsky and Tolstoy;Slavic Languages and Literature;Humanities;Slavic Language and Literature

Arnold, Yanina V.Khagi, Sofya ;

University of Michigan

关键词: 19th Century Russian Literature;    Law and Literature;    19th Century Russian History;    Literary Lawyers;    The Judicial Reform of 1864;    Russia;    Dostoevsky and Tolstoy;    Slavic Languages and Literature;    Humanities;    Slavic Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107141/arnoldy_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

My dissertation investigates the unique relationship between fiction, law, and literary criticism in nineteenth century Russia, in the decades following the judicial reform of 1864 that marked the introduction of public trials and trial by jury. Where previous scholarship has remarked on the overwhelmingly negative depiction of courts in late imperial fiction and journalism, my dissertation offers a major correction to this dominant view by looking at the writings by ;;literary lawyers,” a group of late imperial jurists who were also exceptionally successful as litterateurs. Specifically, I explore the writings by such prominent literary lawyers as Vladimir Spasovich (1829-1906), Anatoly Koni (1844-1927), and Sergey Andreevsky (1847-1918), and several others. These literary lawyers wrote both commentaries on the meaning of law for Russian society and literary analyses of the great works of fiction of Russia’s Golden Age. In my dissertation, I focus on the impact of their writings on the competing conceptions of Russian attitudes towards legal justice. Using their respectable position as literary critics, these lawyers mounted the vigorous defense of legal culture. Specifically, they combatted the one-sided historical view of Russia’s deeply-rooted hostility towards law and courts that emerged through the writings and ideological work of such authors of outsized weight and influence as the charismatic editor of Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow News] Mikhail Katkov and novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy, who deliberately crafted an incomplete picture of court justice that has constrained our understanding of it ever since. After the judicial counter-reforms of the 1870s and 80s deprived courts of their important freedoms, literary criticism became important for Russia’s literary lawyers as it offered them an opportunity to express their intellectual position. Using their privileged status as literary experts, these lawyers did their best to recast the works of the great writers as allies in their defense of courts as the sites of legal and humane justice. The war of words between Russia’s writers and lawyers demonstrates that, as a public forum, the medium of literature and literary analysis provided an important venue for debates about the meaning of legal justice in a reluctantly reforming society.