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Fiction and Literary Lawyers in Late Imperial Russia, 1864-1900

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Fiction and Literary Lawyers in Late Imperial Russia, 1864-1900 Writing Justice: Fiction and Literary Lawyers in Late Imperial Russia, 1864-1900 by Yanina V. Arnold A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Slavic Languages and Literatures) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Olga Y. Maiorova, Chair Associate Professor Herbert J. Eagle Associate Professor Sofya Khagi Professor Valerie A. Kivelson ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been written without the intellectual support, friendship, and encouragement of a number of my colleagues at the University of Michigan. I am endlessly grateful to my excellent dissertation advisers Olga Maiorova and Valerie Kivelson, who guided me—patiently and selflessly—throughout the long process of research and writing. They spent countless hours reading and commenting on my drafts. Their ability to see the scholarly value of my work, despite the imperfections of first drafts, transformed the dissertation process, exhausting at times, into an exciting intellectual journey. I particularly appreciated our long conversations about my research that we usually conducted over a cup of coffee or a meal. These informal meetings quickly transformed into the most invaluable part of my graduate training. They enriched me as a scholar and individual, provided me with the appropriate vocabulary to express my ideas, and shaped my research and ways of thinking about Russian culture, literature, and history. I could not have wished for better mentors. I also owe a special debt of thanks to the remaining members of my dissertation committee: Herbert Eagle and Sofya Khagi from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. They have read my dissertation in its entirety, and provided a great number of fine and unexpected insights. I am also thankful to my colleagues from the Department of History at the University of Michigan, whose Russian/Soviet History Workshops I have been attending for a number of years. Attendance at these workshops led by such fine scholars as Ronald Suny, ii William Rosenberg, Douglas Northrop, Valerie Kivelson, and Olga Maiorova, and many others, exposed me to contemporary scholarship and debates, and nurtured my thought and writing throughout my time as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Finally, many of my friends and graduate colleagues, including Marin Turk, Olga Greco, Vladislav Beronja, Adam Kolkman, Jodi Greig, Sarah Sutter, and Eric Ford, have read, edited, and provided useful feedback on this dissertation along the way. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Marin Turk’s editing help: she helped me polish a great number of translations in this dissertation. I also would like to thank the Slavic Department’s administrator Jean McKee for her support and assistance with all manner of technology and other graduate troubles. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii LIST OF FIGURES vi ABSTRACT viii INTRODUCTION: “The Authority of Law: Fiction, 1 Literary Criticism, and the Literary Lawyers in Late Imperial Russia (1864-1900)” CHAPTER 1. The Shakespearean Circle: 21 Lawyers, Literary Criticism, and the Law in Late Imperial Russia 2. Russian Cause Célèbre: 82 Court Speech as a Literary and Social Genre in Late Imperial Russia 3. Mikhail Katkov, Literary Lawyers, and 138 iv the Trope of the “Oranic Error” 4. Dostoevsky, Literary Lawyers, 174 and the Ethics of Feelings 5. Literary Lawyers and 229 the Appropriation of Tolstoy CONCLUSION: Literature and Respect for Law 281 APPENDIX Translation from Sergey Andreevsky’s 286 Memoir The Book of Death v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Invitations to the Meetings of the Shakespearean Circle. 72 Figure 1.2: The Cover of S.A. Vengerov’s Collected Works 73 of Shakespeare, 1902-1904. Figure 1.3: Illustration from Vengerov’s Shakespeare: “Hamlet 74 and the Ghost.” Figure 1.4: Illustration from Vengerov’s Shakespeare: 75 Scene from the performance. Figure 1.5: Illustration from Vengerov’s Shakespeare: 76 Vasily Karatygin as Hamlet. Figure 2.1: The Front Page of the Fifth Edition of Sergey 82 Andreevsky’s Collected Speaches: The Dramas of Life, Petrograd: 1916. Figure 2.2: “Gambetta’s Gestures during Speeches,” Fragments, 1881. 127 Figure 2.3: “In the Hallway of the Court during the Nechaev Trial.” 128 Figure 2.4: “The Trial of the Regicides,” Fragments, 1881. 129 Figure 2.5: “The Lawyer in Court,” Fragments, 1884. 130 Figure 2.6: “The Dream of a Lawyer ,” Fragments, 1884. 132 vi Figure 2.7: “The Litigants and Their Lawyers,” Fragments, 1882. 133 Figure 2.8: The Front Page of The Art of Court Speech, 1910. 135 Figure 5.1: Lev Tolstoy and Anatoly Koni in Iasnaia Poliana (1904). 229 The photograph from the archive of S. A. Tolstaya. Figure 5.2: “In a City Court” by Maxim Dmitriev (circa 1890-1900). 274 vii ABSTRACT 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 viii 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. ix INTRODUCTION The Authority of Law: Fiction, Literary Criticism, and the Literary Lawyers in Late Imperial Russia (1864-1900) For some organic reason, We are utterly unequipped With these progenies of Satan, Common sense and legal wit. Russian natures are too broad, And our truth does not conform To the formal, narrow road Of a strictly legal form. From a satirical poem by Boris Almazov. Quoted from the essay by Bogdan Kistyakovsky “In the Defense of Law” (1909).1 What makes people respect law? This question was not on my mind as I began to write this dissertation. However, as I progressed in my writing, the question of respect for law began to emerge more frequently and more urgently, often in connection to a particular chapter that I was working on at the time. It is a common statement in any discussion of Russia’s legal culture—be it the nineteenth, twentieth, or even twenty-first century—that Russia has always lacked a properly developed legal consciousness, and, throughout history, Russian authorities (monarchs, the Communist Party leaders, post-communist authorities) gravitated towards lawlessness. Writing in 1909, the legal scholar Bogdan Kistiakovskii lamented the absence of respect for law even among Russian intelligentsia, a lack that for Kistiakovskii was confirmed by the hostility of 1 Russian literature to the idea of the rule of law. Kistiakovskii’s use of the term “literature” should, however, be clarified: by “literature,” Kistiakovskii referred not to fiction specifically, but to other kinds of writings, predominantly philosophical and polemical in nature, that in the Western European context corresponded to such influential works as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) or Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762). Kistiakovskii argued that in the absence of important works about the significance of law for society Russian intelligentsia continued to lack the intellectual nourishment necessary for the development of a more respectful attitude towards law as a social mechanism. Kistiakovskii wrote: Our intelligentsia’s legal consciousness could have been developed by the exposition of legal ideas in literature. Such an exposition could have at the same time been an index of our legal awareness. The intense activity of consciousness, the persistent exertion of thought in a given direction, always receives its expression in literature. In it we must first seek our testimony as to the nature of our legal consciousness. […] Now, in that totality of ideas out of which our intelligentsia’s world-view takes shape, the idea of law has no place at all. Literature specifically is a witness to this [gap] in our social consciousness.2 Kistiakovskii was certainly correct, and nothing comparable to Montesquieu’s or Rousseau’s writings emerged in Russia. Catherine II’s Nakaz, permeated with the legal ideas of the French Enlightenment, could not be compared to the aforementioned works due to the fact that it was a set of instructions penned by the Empress for the legislative commission, and not a reading of a broader, intellectual appeal.
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