debating detectives: the influence ofpublitsistikaon nineteenth-century russian crime fiction

Debating Detectives: The Influence of publitsistika on Nineteenth-Century Russian CrimeFictionAuthor(s): Claire WhiteheadSource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 107, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 230-258Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.107.1.0230 .Accessed: 15/03/2014 04:59

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DEBATING DETECTIVES: THEINFLUENCE OF PUBLITSISTIKA ON

NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN CRIME FICTION

It may come as something of a surprise to those critics who interpret the hugepopularity of detective ction amongst Russias contemporary reading publicas a reaction to post-glasnost liberalization, but this genre can actually traceits roots to the mid- to late nineteenth century. Indeed, the inexorable rise ofthe detektiv in post-Soviet Russia was foreshadowed by the birth of detectivection under the relatively liberal regime of Alexander II in the s. Duringthis period Russia began to make up for lost time and catch up with certainof its Western counterparts in developing an indigenous practice of crimewriting. While France was able to point to Honor de Balzacs depiction ofVautrin in Le Pre Goriot of , America to Edgar Allan Poes trilogy ofDupin stories in the s, and Great Britain to the presence of InspectorBucket in Charles Dickenss Bleak House of , during the same periodRussia had little more than translated foreign works to oer its readers. Suchrelative tardiness can be explained by three principal factors: strict censorshiplaws introduced by Nikolai I in response to the Decembrist uprising of which restricted the possibility of depicting crime in literature; the countryssocial organization in the years before the Act of Emancipation, whichsaw some per cent of the population eectively owned by the noble classesand therefore subject to an ad hoc system of justice; and the unsatisfactoryand outmoded character of its legal system which spoke volumes about theinjustices inherent in this patrimonial system. is archaic legal system hadremained virtually unchanged from the time of Catherine the Great (r. ) and so, by the early s, there was little that was not wrong with it.e main criticisms levelled at it included: the dizzying variety of dierentcourts in operation which exceeded that in any other European country at thetime; the fact that there was no division between the executive and legislativesystems; the absence of the principle of the equality of all citizens before the

is article could not have been written without the generous nancial support of the Carnegie Trustfor the Universities of Scotland, whose award of a research grant enabled me to undertake researchin the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg which informs much of the work presented here.

See Samuel Kutschero, Administration of Justice under Nicholas I of Russia, American Slavicand East European Review, . (April ), : To the rst instance as courts of originaljurisdiction belonged district courts, city courts, guildhalls, aulic courts (restored by Catherine II),boundary oces, and commercial courts. In addition, there were sovestnye sudy, arbitrationalcourts, and special courts for every class of society. e peasants had their village and villagedistrict administration (volostnye sudy) with judicial functions. [. . .] e second instance wasrepresented by the civil and criminal tribunals (Palaty), which in small towns were contractedinto one court. [. . .] e third instance was the Ruling Senate, consisting of senators appointed bythe government (p. ).


law; the continued existence of an inquisitorial legal process reliant on secretwritten procedures in which the accused had no access to his/her accuser andno right to a defence; the possibility of those accused of crimes being neitherconvicted nor acquitted but le under suspicion for an indenite period; thesnails pace of the legal process which could see cases last for decades; and thepersistence of the recourse to capital punishment.

Russias defeat in the Crimean War in le the new tsar, Alexander II,in little doubt about the need for a series of Great Reforms to make his countrymore modern and more productive. ese included far-reaching changes toRussias judicial system which were enacted by the publication of Sudebnyeustavy [Court Statutes] on November . ese statutes representedAlexander IIs eorts to provide Russia with a judicial system which was, inhis words:

swi, just and merciful [. . .], to give it the appropriate independence, and in generalto strengthen in the people that respect for law, without which public prosperity isimpossible and which should be the constant guide of each and everyone from thehighest to the lowest.

On the whole, the legal reforms were welcomed and are considered to beamong the most successful and enduring of the various modernizing moves ofthe s and s. In theOctober edition of the journalVremia [Time],for instance, one critic anticipates that they will represent preobrazovanie,kotoroe po ogromnoi vazhnosti svoei pochti ravniaetsia osvobozhdeniiukrestian ot krepostnoi zavisimosti (a transformation which, in terms ofits immense importance, almost equals the emancipation of the serfs).eseCourt Statutes, which introduced into Russia elements copied from the Eng-lish, French, and German systems, made the judiciary independent of theadministrative framework of the state and the executive; introduced trial byjury to ensure the participation of the people in the administration of justice;

V. A. Shuvalova, O sushchnosti sudebnoi reformy g. v Rossii, Sovetskoe gosudarvstvoi pravo, (), (p. ). In her Russias Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, ) Harriet Murav sums up the pre-reform legal system in the following terms:at there is no rule of law, or even a professed ideology of the rule of law, in Russia in goes without saying. ere is no equality before the law, no access to ones accuser, no rightto a defense, no principle of innocent until proven guilty. [. . .] e judiciary institutions aresubordinated to the tsars autocratic powers. [. . .] e police and the courts are one institution.Instead of procedural norms, which allow for exibility and predictability in the exercise of thelaw, there is a forest of specic and particular regulations. [. . .] In the prereform inquisitorialcourt there is no contest about what happened, no evaluation of the individual circumstances ofthe case, no interpretation and no story, but a grid of matching crimes and punishments: the actof the criminal compared with the laws (p. ).

Quoted in Richard Wortman, e Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago:Chicago University Press, ), pp. .

Nashi domashnie dela, Vremia, ., (p. ). Alexander K. Afanasev, Jurors and Jury Trials in Imperial Russia, , in Russias


Publitsistika and Nineteenth-Century Russian Crime Fiction

rendered all subjects equal before the law; and transformed the trial intoan open, public, oral proceeding organized to a far greater degree by theadversarial principle, as well as establishing the institution of the bar andjustices of the peace (mirovoi sud). Soon aer the introduction of these judicialreforms, Russian crime ction rst saw the light of day.It might be tempting to infer a straightforwardly causal relationship between

the simple fact of the introduction of these judicial reforms on the one hand,and the birth of crime ction in Russia on the other. Such an inference wouldview the appearance of the rst detective ction in the mid-s as no morethan a natural reaction to the new reality of an improved court system, whichincluded the institution of a quasi-detective gure, and all of the interestand excitement surrounding it. However, although the positing of such arelationship is quite justiable, it nevertheless overlooks an essential interme-diary in this process: the role of publitsistika (polemical writing) as a conduitbetween socio-historical factors and literary ctional production.e activityof F. M. Dostoevskii during this period, engaged as he was in authoring andediting discursive articles on issues of crime as well as in composing literaryworks featuring criminals, lawyers, and investigators, provides unmistakableevidence that such a relationship existed. is article therefore seeks to illus-trate how the literary practice of writing detective stories in Russia during theperiod is heavily inuenced by, and indebted to, the discussion oflegal issues in publitsistika articles of the same period.Russia boasts, of course, a strong tradition of journals, especially literary

journals, which began in the early part of the nineteenth century and con-tinued through the Soviet period. In the early years of their existence thesejournals and their contributors played a hugely signicant role in the deve-lopment of Russian society. By means of their polemical writing, gures suchas V. G. Belinskii, A. I. Herzen, N. G. Chernyshevskii, N. A. Dobroliubov, andD. I. Pisarev exerted a telling inuence upon certain sections of the popula-tion which ultimately led to social progress. In his survey of Russian journalsbetween the years and Robert Belknap acknowledges this role:

By the late s, Russia had two dozen active and serious literary journals, some witha special theatrical, historical, or political readership and almost all with some sub-stantial involvement in the extraliterary world. [. . .] Several new journals were being

Great Reforms, , ed. by Ben Eklof and others (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,), pp. (p. ), claims that the jury court was the single most important institutionassociated with the judicial reform.

Murav, p. . For further discussion of the context and consequences of these judicial reformssee Wortman, pp. .

As Louise McReynolds does in Who Cares Who Killed Ivan Ivanovich?: e LiteraryDetective in Tsarist Russia, Russian History, (), (p. ).

On the excitement generated by the reforms and their impact upon enrolment in juridicalfaculties see Wortman, pp. .


established every year and provided the intellectual, moral, and political foundationsfor the innovative bureaucrats exploring ways of reforming a society that plainly wasnot functioning well.

Although these various journals might reveal dierent political points of viewand place a greater or lesser emphasis on certain subjects, many had a verysimilar internal structure, for instance. Journals such as Otechestvennye za-piski [Notes of the Fatherland] (initially founded in but then revived aera seven-year hiatus in ), Biblioteka dlia chteniia [Library for Reading](which started in ), Sovremennik [e Contemporary] (founded by A. S.Pushkin in ), Russkoe slovo [Russian Word] (founded in ), Vremiaand Epokha [Epoch] (the rst appearing between and , the secondbetween and , and both founded by Dostoevskii and his brotherMikhail) all featured sections which published original literary works; re-viewed works of ction and non-ction from home and abroad; discussed awide range of foreign aairs, including political and military developments;and, most importantly for the purposes of the present article, debated a wholehost of domestic issues of interest.Such discussion, in print, on the pressing problems of social-political life

is known in Russian as publitsistika. In the Brokgauz-Efron encyclope-dia, whose contributors included prominent cultural gures such as VladimirSolovv, commented that publitsistika played a special political role in Russia,which, because of its strict autocratic system, lacked alternative outlets for theexpression of social thinking. In her thesis on Solovv Pauline Schrooyenprovides a fuller denition of publitsistika as being:

a written form of critical public discourse appearing in (non-specialized) journals andnewspapers regarding current aairs of national interest. It is a critical public discoursethat is accessible to the average member of educated society, has no preconceived biasesrestricting it to particular disciplines or world views, and is intended to create nationalawareness, to shape public opinion and, preferably, to exert an inuence on politics.

As the principal expression of private social-political initiative, publitsistikahad been a hugely important instrument of expression in Russia since at leastthe s. However, during the period of the Great Reforms it gained an evenmore signicant position. Beginning in the late s, every journal featured

Robert L. Belknap, Survey of Russian Journals, , in Literary Journals in ImperialRussia, ed. by Deborah A. Martinsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. (pp. ).

A.G., Publitsistika, in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar, ed. by K. Arsenev, a (St Petersburg:Brokgauz-Efron, ), pp. (p. ). See also Belknap, p. .

A.G., Publitsistika, p. . Pauline Wilhelmine Schrooyen, Vladimir Solovv in the Rising Public Sphere: A Recon-

struction and Analysis of the Concept of Christian Politics in the publitsistika of Vladimir Solovv(unpublished doctoral thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen, ), pp. .

A.G., Publitsistika, p. .



numerous articles or sections which debated the importance, the implementa-tion, and the consequences of the various changes being proposed to Russiassocial organization.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the judicial reforms, which radically modernized

Russias legal landscape, generated an explosion of interest in the press.roughout the s, the liberal press heatedly discussed all facets of thereforms, including the questions they raised about power and rights as wellas the role of the court in government and society. Authors of publitsistikaarticles began to engage in wide-ranging discussions of how best the judicialsystem should be altered; once reforms had been introduced they explainedtheir content as well as criticizing or praising elements therein; they reportedon criminal trials from abroad, particularly in England and France, in order toillustrate how those systems functioned; they reviewed foreign books whichdiscussed judicial structures as a means of commenting on the changes athome; and they proposed theories regarding the reasons for and interpre-tations of the phenomenon of crime in Russian society. e possibility forthe press to pursue this debate was granted by the relaxation in censorshiplaws which accompanied the post- reform period. By the ButurlinCommittee, instigated under Nikolai I to review all published material andwith the power to discipline everyone involved in the publication of criticalmaterial, had ceased to function. As Belknap remarks, during this periodglasnost again became a watchword for the press.

What the present article seeks to show is that the inuence of such polemicaldiscussion was not restricted to politics and public opinion alone, but ratherthat, in this reform period, the contents of such journal articles also markedlyaected the nascent genre of detective ction in Russia. e beliefs expressed,the points made, and the arguments conducted in the non-ctional genreof publitsistika were picked up and used by authors to help shape literaryctional treatments of crime. It is of course not possible to state denitivelythat without publitsistika Russian detective ction would not have been born;in fact, that seems unlikely. But what an investigation into the contents of theformer, and comparison with the latter, shows is that in the s and s,in particular, there are numerous and important points of cross-over betweenthe elds of polemical journalism and literature. A consideration of the focusand contents of publitsistika articles can therefore be used to attain a morenuanced understanding of the themes and preoccupations of early Russiandetective ction. Indeed, it suggests that to ignore the contents of publitsistikawriting on crime and its impact upon ctional writing would be to presentonly a partial picture of the landscape surrounding the birth of detective

Deborah A. Martinsen, Dostoevskys Diary of a Writer: Journal of the s, in LiteraryJournals in Imperial Russia, ed. by Martinsen, pp. (p. ).

Belknap, p. .


ction in Russia. is article will highlight this inuence by illustrating howa number of key issues surrounding the judicial reforms in the early sare rst raised in publitsistika and then given ctional literary illustration indetective works.e most striking examples of intersections between publitsistika and crime

ction during this period centre upon the gure of the sudebnyi sledovatel(or examining magistrate) in Russias new legal landscape.is position wasactually introduced well ahead of the Court Statutes by means of theUchrezhdenie sudebnykh sledovatelei Act of June . As such it can beconsidered to represent the rst step in Russias judicial reforms. Writing inRusskoe slovo in September , A. Lokhvitskii explained the importance ofthis legislation:

, . , , -, , -.

e most important act published this year is the institution of Examining Magistrates.It is signicant not only because it introduced a positive change into the system ofcarrying out an investigation, which is the most important act of the legal process, butalso because it established new principles in the great question of individual freedomand legal procedure, which were previously completely unknown to our judiciary.

is new position, resembling in many respects the French juge dinstruction,is the closest thing one gets in Russia at the time to the more Western conceptof a police detective. Simply put, the sudebnyi sledovatel, who operatedunder the auspices of the local court system and was answerable to the localprocurator, assumed responsibility for the pre-trial investigation into crimeswhich would previously have been conducted by the local police. Indeed,dissatisfaction with the inecacy of Russias local police forces was cited asa signicant motivating factor in the creation of the new position. As thewell-known criminologist I. Ia. Foinitskii noted in :

-

I adopt the term examining magistrate from the revised Jessie Coulson translation ofDostoevskiis Crime and Punishment as the best translation of the Russian. In Russias LegalFictions Harriet Murav employs the term pre-trial investigator, which would also be appropriate.

A. Lokhvitskii, Sudebnye sledovatelia, Russkoe slovo, September , pp. (p. ). Alltranslations from both publitsistika articles and literary texts used henceforth are my own.

e position of syshchik (searcher or detective) was largely unocial in late nineteenth-century Russia and is most commonly used to refer to the examining magistrates sidekick.e position was formalized in by the creation in eighty-nine Russian cities of detectivedepartments.



, - .

Inadequacies in the preliminary investigation conducted by the police were so obviousthat transferral of the investigation to judicial organs could be undertaken even in thepre-reform judicial system.

e stated aim behind the introduction of this new position was to ensuregreater professionalism, legality and objectivity in the investigatory stages ofthe case. However, promulgation of the Act was likely also to havebeen prompted, at least in part, by the desire to free up police time so thatthey could deal with the anticipated civil unrest triggered by the emancipationof the serfs due the following year. Under this Act, the examining magistrateenjoyed considerable authority, including the right to interrogate victims, sus-pects, and witnesses either under oath or not; to collect material evidence andto search premises; and to place suspects under arrest. At the conclusion of hisinvestigation, the examining magistrate had to present his written evidenceto the procurator, who would make a decision about whether the case shouldcome in front of a court. What is particularly noteworthy about the authorityinvested in, and the qualities expected of, this new role is how, in , it wasclearly intended to embody the values which would be promoted by the laterand more wide-ranging judicial reforms of .Because of its originality and its status as a foretaste of the more substan-

tial changes to come, the new institution of the sudebnyi sledovatel piquedthe interest of many publitsistika writers, who considered that it raised anumber of issues necessitating debate. For instance, the author of the Vnu-trennie novosti section of Vremias March edition, having criticizedthe secretive and largely unjust character of the old system of justice, posesthe following questions: K kakomu by razriadu dolzhnostei prichislit ee?K razriadu li pochetnykh ili nepochetnykh, trebuiushchikh beskorystiia ilinetrebuiushchikh? (What sort of category will this new post belong to? Tothe honourable or dishonourable sort, to that demanding the absence of self-interest or not?). In an attempt to provide an answer, the author reports

I. Ia. Foinitskii, Russkaia karatelnaia sistema, in Sbornik gosudarstvennykh znanii, (StPetersburg, ), p. . In the Vnutrennie novosti section of Vremia for March , the authorrecalled how the Moscow procurator outlined to the newly appointed examining magistratesgorestnoe polozhenie, v kotorom nakhodilas do sikh por sledstvennaia chast, byvshaia v rukakhnaruzhnoi politsii (the pitiful state in which the investigative section had found itself until thenbeing as it was in the hands of the external police, p. ). P. I. Stepanovs Pravye i vinovatye:zapiski sledovatelia sorokovykh godov [e Innocent and Guilty: Notes of an Investigator of thes] (St Petersburg: Genkel, ) illustrates this by featuring a governors secretary as theeponymous investigator whose work consists in putting right miscarriages of justice occasionedby the incompetence of the police.

William Burnham, e Legal Context and Contributions of Dostoevskys Crime and Punish-ment, Michigan Law Review, (), (p. ).

Vnutrennie novosti, Vremia, ., (p. ).


upon an address apparently given by the Moscow procurator to newly ap-pointed examining magistrates. It speaks volumes about the unsatisfactorynature of pre- criminal investigations, and justice more generally, thatthe author highlights the procurators following demand: Budte liudmi, gos-poda, a ne chinovnikami. Opiraites na zakon, no obiasniaite ego razumno, stseliu sdelat dobro i prinesti polzu (Be human beings, gentlemen, and notcivil servants. Be dependent upon the law, but explain it reasonably, with theaim of doing good and bringing benet).

Given that Dostoevskii would have been well aware of the contents of thisarticle in his role as editor of, and contributor to, Vremia, it is not surprisingthat such a desire for humanity in examining magistrates should have founda response in his depiction of Porrii Petrovich in Prestuplenie i nakazanie[Crime and Punishment] (). Dostoevskiis investigator is notable for hissomewhat unusual approach to unmasking the culprit of a brutal doublemurder. He very rarely treats the murderer, Raskolnikov, as a criminal whoneeds to be caught and far more oen like a human being in need of salvation.He shies away from arresting the man he is sure is the killer, preferring toallow Raskolnikov the time and space to decide that he should voluntarilygive himself up. In the novels Epilogue, which opens with a description of thetrial, Dostoevskiis narrator expressly notes that Porrii has kept his word bynot telling the prosecutor that he had already identied a prime suspect forthe crime before Raskolnikovs confession. In so doing, Porrii ensures thatRaskolnikov will receive a more lenient sentence as well as encouraging himto rejoin the human family through a process of spiritual redemption.

Dostoevskii was not, however, the rst author of crime ction in Russiato underscore the importance of a humane approach on the part of the newexamining magistrates. Before him came N. M. Sokolovskii, who graduatedin law from Kazan University in the late s, wrote publitsistika articles formost of the leading journals of the time, and later worked in St Petersburgas a prisiazhnyi poverennyi (barrister). During and he publishedOstrog i zhizn: iz zapisok sledovatelia [Prison and Life: From the Notes ofan Investigator], which contains nine stories, in instalments in Vremia.

In the collections opening story, Skvernye minuty [Fateful Minutes], thenarrator-detective makes explicit his belief that good detectives need to feelconsiderable sympathy with the criminals they confront, and he confesses

Ibid., p. . In Bratia Karamazovy [e Karamazov Brothers] () the examining magistrate, Nikolai

Neliudov, who will be discussed in more detail below, is shown displaying a degree of compas-sion towards Dmitrii Karamazov, imploring him to drink water and to remain calm during hisinterrogation.

Ostrog i zhizn: iz zapisok sledovatelia was rst serialized in December and March and then subsequently printed as an individual work by Ovsiannikov in St Petersburg in .Subsequent references are to this reprint.


PublitsistikaandNineteenth-CenturyRussianCrimeFiction

that, from his own personal experience, the task of depriving others of theirfreedom causes as much suering to the examining magistrates as it does tothe prisoners themselves. As he considers the experience of witnessing thetrial of a criminal he has brought to justice, he asks rhetorically:

- ? , ? , , ? , , , -, - , . . .

Why do you feel a sort of heaviness in your heart? Why do you nd it somehowawkward to look into the criminals eyes, into his deathly pale face? Why, in inictingthe blow, does your hand shake? Why in your head, in the face of all evidence andclarity of fact, do nagging questions crop up and why does someone whisper to youthat at that very moment by force of circumstances you are the master of this personsfate, his higher fortunehis freedom . . .

Albeit in a more implicit manner, such humane and sympathetic qualities aresimilarly emphasized in the depiction of the examining magistrate providedin N. P. Timofeevs ctional memoirs, Zapiski sledovatelia [Notes of anInvestigator]. In the second story in this collection, Ubiistvo i samoubiistvo[Murder and Suicide], which is set in , the detective is charged withlooking into the case of Marianna Bodresova, a peasant woman with threeillegitimate children who is arrested aer attempting to hang herself. eexamining magistrate is struck by Bodresovas apparent fear at answeringquestions about why she has tried to kill herself, and he complains:

, . , , , , - , ? , , .

e unceremonious way in which the representative of the local police force treated theunfortunate Bodresovamademe simply indignant.What had the policeman arrested her

Sokolovskii, pp. . e recurrence in works by Sokolovskii, Stepanov, and Timofeev of references to zapiski

(notes), in either the main title or the subtitle, reveals the desire of such authors to suggest aquasi-factual status for their ctional creations. It might also imply a more intimate relationshipwith non-ctional modes of writing, such as publitsistika. e use of such (sub)titles becomes lessfrequent during the mid- to late s.

N. P. Timofeev, Ubiistvo i samoubiistvo, in Zapiski sledovatelia (St Petersburg: Plotnikov,), pp. (pp. ).


for, andwhywas he treating this unfortunatewoman sounsympathetically, I thought, andcan there really be people who in their professional sphere go no further than the simplefullment of empty formality, founding by this formality both the feeling of empathy andsympathywith themisfortune of anotherwhich is common to allmankind? I felt sorry formypoor accused; her personality aroused full sympathy inme for her and Iwished to giveher to understandwithout failmy sympathetic feelings towards her.

roughout the course of his investigation, which reveals how Bodresovawas shockingly abused not only by her parents but also by her half-brother(who is the father of her children and whom she eventually premeditatedlymurders), the narrator-detective never ceases to treat her and her childrencompassionately. When he rst goes to their hut to collect the children andtake them to Bodresova in custody, he assures them he will not beat them,speaks to them soly in order to gain their trust, and eventually persuadesthem to follow him willingly. He openly admits that he is close to tears as sherecounts the details of her various suerings; he questions her patiently andsympathetically during their three interviews; and he feels a strong sense ofguilt when she is sent to prison for the murder and subsequently cuts her ownthroat.In a later story, Muzhniaia zhena: bytovoi ocherk [A Married Woman:

A Sketch from Everyday Life] of , the same examining magistrate isassigned to the case of a young woman who has apparently tried to poison herhusband. e narrator-detective is initially mystied by what possible moti-vation there can have been for this crime in view of the fact that the recentmarriage between Irina and Vlas was one of love rather than arrangement,and that relations between the two are reported to have been very good. Hisusual methodology of rationally considering all possible reasons for the crimedoes not appear to be working as he recognizes that the secret lies in Irinasemotional make-up. In such cases, he says, there is a tried and tested meansof getting to the truth:

, - , , , , -, , , .

to sway the soul and heart of a person, appearing before them not as a civil servant car- e horrors of Bodresovas life are almost too numerous to list, but include: being abandoned

by her parents until the age of three; almost being killed by a bear hired by her mother to dojust that; being unable to marry her sweetheart because she is registered as a serf; having a rstchild sired by her own father which dies in infancy; having three more children fathered by herhalf-brother who regularly beats her and uses her as a stake in his gambling, whereupon she isabused by various other men.

N. P. Timofeev, Muzhniaia zhena: bytovoi ocherk, in Iz vospominaniia sudebnogo sledovatelia:ocherki i rasskazy (Moscow: Johanson, ), pp. (p. ).



rying out a formal interrogation, but as simply a human being, relating to the accusedwith complete sympathy and the desire to alleviate the drastic situation of their soulwith kindness, a word of sympathetic disposition, to rouse their consciousness and toinvite them into a frank conversation which will lighten the burden of their crime.

e terms used by Timofeevs narrator here echo closely those of the Moscowprocurator reported in the Vremia article cited above. ey could also rea-sonably have been uttered by Porrii Petrovich in Prestuplenie i nakazanie asa summary of his approach with Raskolnikov. And this method proves to beeective: throughout the story, the narrator treats Irina and Vlas sympathe-tically while being careful not to reveal his antipathetic feelings towards Vlassfather, and eventually he persuades the woman to confess that the poison wasintended for her father-in-law as revenge for his persistent raping of her. eexamining magistrates humane attitude to the young couple extends to hisexplicit hope that Irina will be cleared of the charges against her and to himvisiting them a year later to check on their progress.During the early s numerous publitsistika articles also emphasized

the need for both the post- legal system in general and the examin-ing magistrate in person to prove their independence and impartiality. eauthor of the Nashi domashnie dela section of Vremia for October ,for example, claims that the foremost expectation of the forthcoming legalreforms is that vlast sudebnaia otdeliaetsia ot ispolnitelnoi, administrativ-noi i zakonodatelnoi (judicial power will be separated from the executive,administrative, and legislative powers, emphasis original). Comparing theFrench juge dinstruction with the examining magistrate in Russkoe slovo in, A. Lokhvitskii dissected the practical implications of the declared bes-smenost (immovability) of the new Russian post, which was intended to actas a guarantee of this desired independence. In France, this immovabilitymeant that the juge dinstruction could not be removed from his post except bya judicial order in response to gross professional misconduct, such as breakingthe law. In Russia, the possibilities for removing an examiningmagistrate froma case were slightly less restricted but were nevertheless designed to ensurethat these new investigators could pursue criminals regardless of their statuswithout fear of professional reprisals. In fact, the implications of this statuteof the new law are hinted at by the Moscow procurator cited in the March edition of Vremia referred to above. Among his various exhortations tothe new crop of examining magistrates about to embark on their careers isthat they should be able to claim chto vy sluzhili delu, a ne litsam (that youhave served the case and not (inuential) individuals).

Almost without exception, the detective stories published in Russia in the Vremia, ., . Sudebnye sledovatelia, pp. . Vnutrennie novosti, p. .


period imbue their investigators with this highly valued quality ofprofessional independence and incorruptibility. P. I. Stepanovs collectionPravye i vinovatye: zapiski sledovatelia sorokovykh godov [e Innocent andthe Guilty: Notes from an Investigator of the s] includes a story, Khotelipredat sudu i vole Bozhiei [ey Wanted to Cheat the Court and GodsWill], in which this independence is projected backwards onto the charac-ter of a governors secretary charged with rectifying miscarriages of justice.In his eorts to unmask the culprits in the unsolved murder of the peasantZadornyi, the narrator employs a clerk from a dierent district, takes along hisown Kazak helpers, and is quite prepared to insult the local landowner by re-fusing his oer of accommodation.e investigators wish to keep his distancefrom this inuential gure, whom he suspects was instrumental in originallykeeping the culprits hidden, is in stark contrast to the behaviour of the localpolice and judge, who were all enjoying a banquet at the landowners home onthe night of the murder. Back in the post- context, in Timofeevs storyPodzhigateli [Arsonists], the examining magistrate is assigned to a case inthe western area of Russia in the immediate aermath of the failed Polishinsurrection of . He is asked to investigate an accusation that one ofthe most prominent Polish landowners in his district has been harbouringsuspected arsonists on his estate. In the very earliest stages of his work, thenarrator-detective receives a letter from the local governor ordering him toreport on his progress every three days and warning him that, because of thepolitical sensitivity of the case:

- , .

any failure in such an important case will be attributed not only to your carelessnessin the matter of your service, but also to your negligence and inattention to theassignments entrusted to you.

e examining magistrate is annoyed by such an overt eort to interfere inand inuence his work, and he resolutely refuses to bow to the pressure. eremainder of the story paints a picture of an investigator who patiently andimpartially pursues the landowners servant, who has maliciously concoctedthe story of the arsonists having been sheltered. He is not afraid to disappointhis political masters by relying on the evidence of witnesses testimonies ratherthan being swayed by the anti-Polish prejudice which was rife at the time.e professional dedication of examining magistrates is established as such

a given in Russian detective ction of this period that when, on the very oddoccasion, one is depicted as less than impartial or independent, it comes as

Published by Stepanov in St Petersburg in . Timofeev, Podzhigateli, in Zapiski sledovatelia, pp. (pp. ).



quite a surprise. In S. A. Panovs story Iz zhizni uezdnogo gorodka:iz zapisok sudebnogo sledovatelia [From the Life of a Provincial Town: Fromthe Notes of an Examining Magistrate] the protagonist, Vadim VadimovichPolumordin, is depicted as a dishonest and conniving character who is quitehappy to pursue a spurious case of child abandonment against an obviouslyinnocent woman in order to gain vengeance on one of his enemies. Polu-mordin is initially utterly uninterested in the circumstances surrounding theabandoned childs death, and is prompted to look into them only when heis goaded into it by the local police inspector, who agrees to wager a case ofchampagne on the outcome. e fact that the majority of the characters in thestory also display a considerable degree of poshlost and dubious morality doesnothing to excuse Polumordins determination to use his professional positionto ensure the downfall of his enemies. Albeit to a far lesser extent than Panovhere, Dostoevskii can also be seen to depart from the more positive normfor the characterization of examining magistrates in the portrait he draws ofNikolai Parfenovich Neliudov in Bratia Karamazovy. Neliudov is described asbeing a shalun (naughty man) who pursues a life of pleasure in the companyof women and whose ngers are adorned with numerous sparkling rings.

He is undermined further on two counts: the rst is that both he and thetowns public prosecutor pursue and bring to trial the wrong man, entirelyignoring the actual culprit, Smerdiakov; the second is that Neliudov is oenpresented from the negatively disposed point of view of Dmitrii Karamazovas being a boy not up to the task of recognizing the truth.Polumordin and Neliudov are, however, rare exceptions among Russias

gentleman detectives. At least to a certain extent, the hope placed in the abi-lity of the new examining magistrates to function more justly and successfullythan their police counterparts stemmed from the requirement that they bemen who had received higher education in the law. For the author of theMarch Vremia article cited above, the higher education of examiningmagistrates is of crucial importance because:

-, , .

It is interesting to consider why writers such as Stepanov, Timofeev, and Panov were all soconformist in their views on the qualities possessed by the examining magistrate. e supportexpressed in their ctional work might simply be a reection of broader public opinion. It mightalso, however, have been informed by a desire not to upset the authorities at a time of relativeliberalism.

S. A. Panov, Iz zhizni uezdnogo gorodka: iz zapisok sudebnogo sledovatelia (St Petersburg:Skariatin, ).

F. M. Dostoevskii, Bratia Karamazovy, in Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow:Khudozhestvennaia literatura, ), , .

Vnutrennie novosti, p. .


it gives the post considerable respectability and has already aroused general sympathy,as is evidenced by the protests and explanations which have appeared in severalquarters about the nomination of people who have not received this level of education.

e characterization of the examining magistrate as an educated, intelligent,and rational gure, frequently in stark contrast to representatives of the localpolice, is a feature shared by almost all Russian detective stories in the post-reform period. In Timofeevs Prestuplenie sueveriia [A Crime of Supersti-tion] of , for instance, the narrator-detective is summoned to the villageof Gerdova to investigate a case of six bodies which have been disinterredfrom the local graveyard. He is confronted in his work by the villagers deeplyheld superstitious belief in the possibility that the dead can return to walkthe earth and haunt the living. is conviction has been exploited by both thelocal fortune-teller and a mysterious beggar woman to incite the father of oneof the victims to dig up and mutilate his sons body in order to save the restof the village from an outbreak of smallpox. In the course of his investigationthe examining magistrate is portrayed as the voice of reason from the modernworld who, while acknowledging that it is neither his professional duty norhis personal desire to dissuade them from their superstitious beliefs, doeswarn the villagers about the danger of mixing these beliefs with too muchvodka.

Likewise, with the notable exception of the unconventional Iz zhizniuezdnogo gorodka: iz zapisok sudebnogo sledovatelia, the detective storiesof S. A. Panov all very clearly establish and illustrate the education and in-telligence of the examining magistrate. In Pomoch [Harvest-Gathering],published in , for example, the narrator knows that he must have arrivedat the lodgings of his friend, the investigator, because every available surfaceis strewn with legal books as well as various other papers, stamps, and labelswhich are the tools of his trade. is examining magistrates rst action uponhis arrival in the village where he has to investigate the murder of the peasantSinitsyn is to lay out his papers, inks, quills, and regulations of the criminalcode on a makeshi table. All of his preparations initially come to nought,however, because every single one of the villagers is too drunk to testify,having just participated in the pomoch of the title. In Panovs Ubiistvov derevne Medveditse [Murder in Medveditsa Village], also of , theexamining magistrate distinguishes himself from the local villagers and mostof the local police force thanks to his literacy. Whereas the village constable

N. P. Timofeev, Prestuplenie sueveriia, in Zapiski sledovatelia, pp. (p. ). It should be noted that Dostoevskii explicitly describes Nikolai Neliudov as both educated

and well-bred in Bratia Karamazovy. e term pomoch is taken from the villagers local dialect. e examining magistrate displays

not only his education but also his local knowledge when he explains the meaning of this term tothe narrator.



is not even able to sign his own name on a statement, the protagonist is por-trayed sending and receiving a huge number of written documents pertainingto the case. Ultimately in such stories, the investigators education is shown topay dividends as the overwhelming majority of ctional criminal cases theyare given to deal with are successfully solved.Intriguingly, while publitsistika writers were strongly in favour of Russia

having appropriately educated examining magistrates, they preferred theminitially to be lacking in professional experience. In the opinion of thesewriters and others, such relative inexperience increased the likelihood thatthe new investigators would display the necessary independence and impar-tiality. According to the March article in Vremia again, the Moscowprocurator told his audience of new recruits:

, , . . . - , . . , . , . , .

e majority of you, gentlemen, have only just completed your education. You arestill inexperienced in the job. But your inexperience is valuable to us. You are not yetused to seeing in a prisoner a mute statistic which civil servants go to such lengthsto dump onto one another. For you every case is still new and full of life. You willgain experience soon enough if you decide to give yourself up fully to your work. Yourcolleagues who are already acquainted with the service will share their experience withyou. And, in turn, you will share with them the rst, invaluable ush of youth whichmakes every job turn out well.

e literary incarnations of the detective which appeared in Russia in thes and s suggest that the value placed on inexperience was far fromuniversally shared by ction writers. Given the degree of conformity whichhas been noted in the depiction of other attributes, this divergence is inter-esting and can perhaps be explained by the more transnational convention ofcharacterizing detectives as men of a certain age and experience. In Dosto-evskiis Prestuplenie i nakazanie, for example, although Porrii Petrovich is byno means an old man at thirty-ve and in spite of the fact that Raskolnikovis initially convinced that he will easily outsmart his antagonist, considerableplay is made of the investigators experience and prowess. e reader is toldof the very serious air communicated by his pale eyes and the cold manner inwhich he sometimes speaks; and Razumikhin describes him in the followingterms:

Vnutrennie novosti, p. .


, . ,, , - . . . -, , . . . , , . . . . . . , . . . , , , .

Hes a man of the world all right, but sort of clumsy in another sense. Hes a cleverchap with a lot of common sense, even, only he has a rather peculiar cast of mind . . .Hes suspicious, a sceptic, a cynic . . . he likes to hoodwink peopleoh, I dont reallymean hoodwink, its more that he likes to make fools of them . . . You know, the oldmaterial method . . . And he knows his job, oh, he knows it, all right . . . ere was onecase he cleared up last year, concerning a murder, in which nearly all the clues hadbeen lost.

And, indeed, much of Porriis treatment of Raskolnikov through the de-velopment of the novel betrays a conviction in his methods and a level ofcondence which can only be born of considerable experience.Other authors, however, appear to agree with the view expressed in the pub-

litsistika articles and introduce their readers to detectives who seem almostwet behind the ears. In the opening Pervye vpechatleniia [First Impres-sions] section of Zapiski sledovatelia, N. P. Timofeevs examining magistratedescribes himself as a recently graduated, young man of twenty-two who de-cides to become an investigator aer conceiving a fascination for the unsolvedcases he discovers in the les he copies as part of his unfullling clerks job.When he takes his leave from his former job, his boss reveals some of hisfears:

, , , , . . . - . . . .

ey have given you this job a little bit early; in a year or two maybe, when you wouldbe more experienced and more careful, but youre not just yet . . . youre young andgreen . . . and sometimes still a little bit thoughtless.

And as he travels to his rst assignment, the examining magistrate himselfreects upon his readiness to take on this new role. Initially he expressesjoy and excitement at the life that is opening before him; he is full of naiveenthusiasm and harbours idealistic dreams for his future successes. However,as night falls, his mood becomes much more realistic and sombre. He un-derstands that his new job is going to bring him face to face with what hecalls deistvitelnaia zhizn (real life) and a criminal world with which he isentirely unacquainted. He also acknowledges that the area of Western Russiato which he is being dispatched, in the wake of the Polish insurrection, willmake particular demands of him:

F. M. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Sobranie sochinenii, , . Timofeev, Pervye vpechatleniia, in Zapiski sledovatelia, pp. (p. ).



, , , , , , , - , , .

nevertheless I am setting out on a lonely, independent path for the rst time andmoreover in a place where even a person experienced in life would need a great dealof tact and practical life experience in order to full their duty conscientiously, wisely,and avoiding the possibility of getting carried away, and anybody would agree thatat the age of twenty-two one is not immune to distractions, if not criminal, thensometimes very stupid.

His utter lack of specialized training now lls him with fear and he contem-plates returning to the comfort and security of his clerks job. Nevertheless,he perseveres and the six subsequent stories in the collection demonstrateon numerous occasions the benets of the youthful investigators outlook. Heis repeatedly described as following his conscience in his work; he does notshare the prejudice shown by other functionaries towards the Polish peoplein this border area; and he displays a youthful zeal in his desire to serve boththe truth and the people.Whatever their opinion on the ideal level of experience possessed by ex-

amining magistrates, one point upon which both publitsistika writers andctional authors agree almost unanimously is the authority that these menwill possess. In his September article in Russkoe slovo, A. Lokhvitskii ex-plains how the new legislation places the examining magistrate in the positionof greatest authority in criminal investigations:

[. . .]; , .

According to the previous legal situation, the entire conduct of investigations was theresponsibility of the police [. . .]; now the role of the police has been made secon-dary and preparatory and the primary responsibility has been given to a new judicialagentthe examining magistrate.

Later in the same article, he explains that while police powers are now largelyrestricted to establishing the mere fact that a crime has taken place, vlast iprava sledovatelia vesma obshirny (the power and rights of the investiga-tor are extremely wide-ranging). e examining magistrate is granted theauthority to question any persons as potential witnesses (including privatecitizens and those in government service); he has the right to question people

Ibid., p. . Lokhvitskii, Sudebnye sledovatelia, p. . Ibid., p. .


either under oath or not, and to re-question people under oath who initiallygave evidence not under oath; he is permitted to order searches of premisesand people; in general, he is granted all powers necessary to him to arrive ata solution for the crime which he can present to the procurator. e issue ofthe authority exercised by the examining magistrate in terms of his relation-ship vis--vis other characters within the ctional world and also vis--visthe implied reader in the narrative contract is one of the most important inthe genre of detective ction. On the one hand, the investigators intelligentand responsible dispensation of his professional authority should see himdeciphering clues and pursuing culprits to a successful end; on the other,particularly in those works where the detective is also the narrator, this gureneeds to exercise subtle control over the readers access to information inorder to maintain suspense.e narrator-detective of S. A. Panovs Ubiistvo v Mukhtolovoi roshche:

rasskaz sudebnogo sledovatelia [Murder in Mukhtolovaia Grove: Tale of anExamining Magistrate] is explicit about his status:

: , - ; , , ; ,, , .

e law armed investigators with mighty power: there are no locks which will not opentheir embrace at his rst appearance; there is no power which would dare to standacross his path, so long as his demands are lawful; there are no experts who, envyinghis knowledge, would dare to refuse to co-operate with him.

e exercise of such authority is clearly illustrated in Panovs earlier storyUbiistvo v derevne Medveditse, which has been discussed above. e ex-amining magistrate, Andrei Petrovich, is sent to the eponymous village toinvestigate the murder of the peasant woman Grosheva, who has had herthroat cut. In his eorts to arrive at the truth behind this crime, he uses thefull range of powers at his disposal: he takes written testimony from almostall of the villagers; he presses local people into service as witnesses whilehe conducts a search of the victims hut and while the doctor carries outan autopsy; he holds ochnye stavki (face-to-face interrogations), sometimesrepeatedly, with the most important witnesses; he orders people used as alibisby the main suspect to be brought to Medveditsa from outlying villages inorder to give evidence; and, aer this suspect has broken into his lodgings andthreatened him with a hammer, he places him under arrest until a confessionto Groshevas murder is nally secured from him.

S. A. Panov, Ubiistvo v Mukhtolovoi roshche: rasskaz sudebnogo sledovatelia, (St Petersburg:Sokolov, ), pp. .

For a more detailed reading of Ubiistvo v derevne Medveditse see my recent article e



e relative authority of the examining magistrate is particularly evident indescriptions of his dealings with this prime suspect, Grishanin. As a retiredarmy ocer, Grishanin himself clearly enjoys a position of elevated statusamong the villagers of Medveditsa, and he attempts to use this standing asa reason to be treated dierently from them. Displaying (albeit insucient)knowledge of judicial regulations, Grishanin claims that he does not need toswear an oath before giving evidence because he has already done so whenhe joined the army. e examining magistrate counters this protest, how-ever, by explaining that, as a retired ocer being questioned at this stageas a witness rather than as a suspect, he is still required to swear an oath.Ultimately, the previous authority in the village is unseated when Grishaninis arrested and, thanks to the examining magistrates unusual methodologyand greater power, a confession is secured in front of the village elders.

Having tried to evade justice by a variety of dierent means, Grishanin isnally defeated and is sentenced to twelve years hard labour and the loss ofall privileges.e greater authority and consequent ability to do good of the examining

magistrate relative to the police force is also clearly illustrated in TimofeevsMuzhniaia zhena: bytovoi ocherk. e investigators antipathy towardsIrinas father-in-law, Petr Pankratov, is initially triggered by the latters atti-tude towards him, which includes trying to treat him as an equal. What theexamining magistrate discovers during his investigation is that Pankratov hasbeen repeatedly committing snokharchestvo (illegal sex between a father- anddaughter-in-law), and although his son and other villagers suspect that thisis the case, they are powerless to do anything against it. e positive eectsderiving from the investigators authority are shown when, having informedother villagers that he has arrested Pankratov, many are emboldened to speakout and reveal that he has preyed sexually on numerous other young girls inthe area before his daughter-in-law. e ability of the examining magistrateto overturn the tyrannical power previously exerted by this man casts him inthe role of something of a saviour for the villagers.e authority which is shown to be enjoyed by examining magistrates

within the ctional world is mirrored by the position of relative superioritythey occupy vis--vis the reader. is is most readily shown to be the case inthose works where the investigator also acts as a rst-person narrator. Varioustechniques and devices are employed to signal the narrator-detectives greaterauthority and knowledge, but here we will illustrate just three. In spite of

Letter of the Law: Literacy and Orality in S. A. Panovs Murder in Medveditsa Village, Slavonicand East European Review, (), .

e examining magistrate decides to confront Grishanin with the victims young daughter,who was a witness to the murder, in the hope that the reaction of the child might be revealingand/or prompt a reaction from the suspect.


its potentially disruptive consequences, it is something of a commonplace inRussian detective ction of this era to nd rst-person narrator-detectivesimparting information which appears to come from a source enjoying omni-scient privilege. In Timofeevs Prestuplenie sueveriia, for example, the nar-rator repeatedly provides the reader with detailed and apparently eyewitnessreports on scenes at which he was not personally present. He also reports thethoughts and emotional reactions of other characters as if he enjoyed the sortof unlimited access to their minds more usually associated with omniscientthird-person narrators. Such overstepping of the conventional boundaries ofprivilege is also a favoured technique of A. A. Shkliarevskii. In both Sekretnoesledstvie [A Secret Investigation] and Rasskaz sudebnogo sledovatelia [eTale of an Examining Magistrate] (both from ), early signs of apparentomniscience such as the use of a birds-eye visual perspective and access toother characters minds are subsequently shown to have been misleading, asthe narrator is revealed to be a detective enjoying only human privilege. In allof these cases the intention is the same: to convince the reader of the almostsuperhuman ability of the detective to come by information which places himin a position of greater authority relative to ordinary mortals, whether theybe criminals or readers.is narrator-detective gure also proves to be adept at using his author-

ity and possession of greater knowledge as a device to maintain suspenseand to encourage the reader to carry on trying to decipher the text. Forinstance, the use of ellipses to produce articial gaps in the readers posses-sion of knowledge is a favoured technique. In Timofeevs Muzhniaia zhenathe narrator-detective opens a paragraph following an interview with the al-leged poisoner Irina with the comment: k kakim vyvodam posle vsego etogo,dolzhen byl ia priiti po sushchestvu dela, kak ne k tem, chto . . . (to whatconclusions about the essence of the case should I come aer all of this, if notthat . . .). However, the three elliptical points quoted here are immediatelyfollowed by an entire line of ellipsis, aer which the narrator asks why heshould reveal his conclusions; he says that he would rather that the case beallowed to speak for itself . And so the reader is le, albeit temporarily, ina position of considerably inferior knowledge to that of the narrator, whichnevertheless creates a sense of intrigue about what it is he has found out aboutthe case. Similarly, in Shkliarevskiis story Neraskrytoe prestuplenie [An Un-discovered Crime] from , which recounts the examining magistratesunocial investigation into an apparent case of poisoning which has occurred

Both stories are reprinted in A. A. Shkliarevskii, Chto pobudilo k ubiistvu? (RasskazySledovatelia) (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, ).

Timofeev, Muzhniaia zhena, p. . Reprinted in A. A. Shkliarevskii, Rasskazy iz ugolovnoi khroniki (St Petersburg: Suvorin,

).



many years previously, by means of ellipsis the narrator repeatedly leaves thereader in the dark about crucial elements of what his searches uncover. Hefails, for example, to inform the reader of the contents of certain conversationsbetween the prime suspect, Klementina Voznesenskaia, and the doctor whomay have provided the poison, and he does not pass on relevant informationcontained in a letter sent by Klementina to her lover. Such central gaps ininformation constitute clear examples of instances where the narrator doesnot play fair with the reader but intends by this show of authority to maintainthe addressees sense of suspense.A similar exploitation of narrative authority over the reader is encountered

in the very frequent use of prolepsis in detective stories of the time. In workswritten by all of the authors mentioned so far, the rst-person narrator-detectives establish superiority over the reader by hinting at the future revela-tion of pertinent information. In S. A. Panovs Tri suda ili ubiistvo vo vremiabala: rasskaz sudebnogo sledovatelia v dvukh chastiakh [ree Courts, orMurder during the Ball: Tale of an Examining Magistrate in Two Parts] of, the second chapter opens with the announcement that sleduiushchiiden prines s soboi raskrytie novykh obstoiatelstv, kotorye na balu ne byliobnaruzheni (the following day brought with it the discovery of new circum-stances which were not detected at the ball). e story features numeroussimilar examples of how the narrator-detective uses his posterior temporalstance (which means that by the time that he begins to narrate the storyof his investigation, he is already in possession of all the relevant facts per-taining to it) to hold out promises of future interesting revelations to thereader in a manner intended to increase suspense. In Timofeevs Tri zhizni[ree Lives], rst published in , which sees the examining magistrateinvestigating the suicide of an apparently happily married woman, the fourthchapter closes with the narrator commenting on the secret of what disruptedthe couples conjugal harmony:

. , , , . . . .

Not least because this secret did not remain a secret. Right next to the con of thedeceased on the very evening I was intending to leave the Pogozhevs house, it waspassed to me . . . by a third party.

e narrator thus clearly illustrates to the reader that he already possesses theknowledge which she desires and dangles the promise of it carrot-like in front

S. A. Panov, Tri suda ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala, in Tri suda ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala(St Petersburg: Skariatin, ), pp. (p. ).

N. P. Timofeev, Tri zhizni, in Iz vospominanii sudebnogo sledovatelia: ocherki i rasskazy(Moscow: Johanson, ), pp. (p. ).


of her. e use of such prolepses is a technique which, by the very fact ofits revelation of the superior authorityby dint of greater knowledgeof thenarrator spurs the reader on to try to close the gap in knowledge by readingto the end of the text.Up to this point, the focus has been on how publitsistika discusses and

detective ction subsequently illustrates the positive changes wrought in theRussian judicial system by the institution of the examining magistrate. How-ever, certain polemical articles and ctional works do oer a more criticalappraisal of the role and suggest areas where further improvement is desir-able. In looking forward to the judicial reforms to come in , the Nashidomashnie dela section of Vremia in October argued that:

, , , , .

e role of examining magistrate is the absolute key to the future organization ofthe judicial section, and there is no doubt that the recently introduced regulationsconcerning examining magistrates need to be just as radically modied as all the otherlaws concerning the judicial section.

e author of this article takes issue with two particular points: rstly, theburden of cases imposed upon examining magistrates who sometimes have tostart twenty new cases one day, een the next, seventeen on the next, and allin dierent parts of his district; and secondly, that the law does not specifythe amount of time in which a case should be completed. is latter point istaken up by the author of an article in Sovremennik in , who notes that,although the law species that an examining magistrate must take a witnessstatement from the accused no more than twenty-four hours aer he has beenpresented, it does not specify an overall duration for a case.

Although the majority of S. A. Panovs examining magistrates conducttheir investigations professionally and successfully, they are not averse tovoicing complaints regarding their working conditions. Tri suda ili ubiistvovo vremia bala opens with the narrator-detective describing how he is wokenat one oclock in the morning just when he had gone to bed in the hope of get-ting some rest aer many hours of diligent work. e case brought to him,which proves to be rather complex and time-consuming, is that of the murderof Elena Vladimirovna Ruslanova during a ball to celebrate her engagement.

Nashi domashnie dela, p. . Ibid. Sudebnye ustavy noiabria, in the Sovremennoe obozrenie section of Sovremmenik,

(), (p. ). Panov, Tri suda ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala, p. . Timofeev also habitually opens his stories

with a description of how, desperate to get to bed aer an exhausting day investigating one case,the examining magistrate is prevented from sleeping by a knock at the door which signals theannouncement of a new case.



He notes that, in the very earliest stages of his investigation, he interviewssome witnesses. However, these interrogations reveal very little and theexamining magistrate comes in for considerable criticism both from the localpopulation and in articles published in newspapers citing his lack of talent. InPomoch the examining magistrate complains that he has interviewed eightyof the villagers, none of whom has given any useful testimony, but that he isobliged to stay and interview even more of them until it is clear that he hasexhausted every single possible source of information.During the opening passages of Ubiistvo v derevne Medveditse Andrei

Petrovich is very pessimistic about his chances of success in the case ofGrosheva and laments various aspects of his working conditions: the localpolice at all levels are incompetent and unmotivated; the local peasant mirwill most likely hide the criminal; he feels as though he works entirely alonewith no professional support; he has other cases assigned to him besidesthis one. is point is further elaborated a little later when he meets the leaderof the local district council on the way to Medveditsa. On hearing of AndreiPetrovichs latest assignment, the council leader reveals his concerns aboutthe examining magistrates eectiveness:

, ; , , , . - , ? !

I fully approve of and value your zeal, diligence, and indefatigability; but with thenumber of cases that you have on your hands, the majority are concluded about twoyears aer the crime was committed. And is it possible to work well on a case aer twoyears? No!

e examining magistrates response chimes closely not only with the tenorof the remarks made in the Vremia and Sovremennik articles but also withAlexander IIs declaration:

, . , .

Of course, our system of justice is very complicated and slow. But soon the intro-duction of judicial reform will give us a swi court which will iron out many of theinadequacies.

Shkliarevskiis story Kak liudi pogibaiut: rasskaz sledovatelia [How PeopleDie: An Investigators Tale] (), which describes the case of a forged pawnticket worth just over one rouble and a more serious robbery connected to it,

S. A. Panov, Ubiistvo v derevne Medveditse, in Ubiistvo v derevne Medveditse. Pomoch(St Petersburg: Bazanov, ), pp. (p. ). Ibid.


provides an unusually stark commentary upon the bluntness of the judicialsystem and the unfavourable lot of the examining magistrate. e narrator-detective begins by recording his reluctance to take up the case because heknows that, if the suspect is found guilty, he will have all his privileges re-moved, which seems to the detective to be a high price to pay for a crimeinvolving such a trivial amount of money. Picking up the issue of the delaybetween the introduction of the role of examining magistrates and the pro-mulgation of wider-reaching reforms raised in the article in Sovremennik, thenarrator reveals how, during this period, he and his breed were extremelystrange civil servants. He acknowledges that, in spite of very limited trainingwhich oen saw them turning to French and English novels (rather thanjournals or law books) to supplement their knowledge, they did indeed allhave a zeal for proving their ability and getting to the truth. However, healso confesses that they were waiting for the unveiling of a system of justicewhich was based not only on theory but also on practice, which reduced thepunishments imposed and which recognized the possibility of extenuatingcircumstances. He admits that, during these intervening years, examiningmagistrates oen went against their oath in not pursuing the ends of justice asthey were dictated in law and, where possible, not conducting investigationswhen they considered that the consequences of doing so would be unjust. eplot of Shkliarevskiis story bears this out as the suspects girlfriend hangsherself following her arrest in a denouement clearly intended to accuse theRussian judicial system of inhumanity.If we turn now to nish by considering the content of the judicial reforms

of more widely, rather than the specic attributes of the examining ma-gistrate in particular, early Russian detective ction can be seen to reect theconcerns of publitsistika writers in two broad areas. e rst of these is the in-troduction, through the Sudebnye ustavy, of the notion of the equalityof all citizens before the law. In a review of I. Piskarevs Vvedenie k izucheniiurossiiskikh zakonov [Introduction to the Study of Russian Laws] in Sovremennikin November , the author criticizes Piskarev for confusing the notions ofcitizens having the same right to employ the law and their being equal in itseyes. In the article Vyderzhki iz russkogo zakonodatelstva [Extracts fromRussian Justice], published in Vremia in February , O. Filipov is highlycritical of the notion of dierent punishments for the same crime:

, - , , , . .

O. Filipov, Vyderzhki iz russkogo zakonodatelstva, Vremia, ., (p. ).



e development of our civil life has produced an understanding of the fact that humanrights are not given on the basis of estate, or other advantages, but to the individualhimself, as a consequence of which understanding the institution of serfdom wasabolished. According to such a view of man, the exemption from corporal punishmentof only certain people is hardly justiable.

is view is echoed strongly by P. Tkachev in one of a number of articles hepublished in Vremia in when, referring to the ideas of Jeremy Bentham,he rejects the idea that access to justice should be determined on the basis ofthe social class of the plainti or the importance of the case.

is cornerstone of the judicial reforms receives ample, yet subtle,illustration in the detective and crime stories published in the s ands in Russia. While none of the examining magistrates or narrators inthese works comments upon this issue explicitly, the subjects and outcomesof their investigations clearly reveal this newly established equality. For ex-ample, while the majority of N. P. Timofeevs stories feature characters drawnfrom the peasantry, Tri zhizni shows that the examining magistrates jur-isdiction extends to the landowning classes as he investigates the apparentsuicide of Lidiia Pogozheva. His observations and interrogations reveal thatthe trigger for Lidiias act is the discovery of her husbands indelity withher maid, Masha, who is more of a sister to her than a servant. While nocriminal proceedings are brought because the narrator is satised that this isindeed a case of suicide, the most severe punishment is experienced by Lidiiaswidower, who goes insane through guilt and spends the remainder of his lifein an asylum. It is the work of A. A. Shkliarevskii, however, that provides theclearest illustration of the fact that, in the post- environment, the upperclasses should no longer expect to receive lenient treatment at the hands ofthe law. In his work Utro posle bala [eMorning aer the Ball], the nar-rator, who is now a barrister rather than an examining magistrate, uncoversthe truth behind the gruesome murder and dismemberment of Baroness vonLilienstein by Count Wilhelm von Grossberg. During the original investiga-tion, conducted under the pre- judicial system, the Count was able to usehis social position to avoid answering the polices questions and to go abroaduntil the rumours about his guilt had subsided. However, years later, thevictims family succeeds in getting proceedings against von Grossberg startedagain, whereupon he is arrested, put on trial, and found guilty. In his defenceof his client, the narrator actually places much of the blame for the crimeupon the harmful personality traits and prejudices with which his aristocraticupbringing has imbued him.Russian crime and detective stories from this early period also try, in some

respects, to depict the much-heralded glasnost introduced into the legal

P. Tkachev, O mirovykh sudiakh, Vremia, ., (p. ).


system aer as well as the associated institution of trial by jury. As theauthor of the October article in Vremiamakes clear, one of the four mostimportant tenets of the reforms should be that sudebnye zasedaniia dliaresheniia grazhdanskikh i ugolovnykh del proiskhodit publichno v prisutstviitiazhushchikhsia, obviniaemykh, svidetelei i postoronnikh liudei (judicialsessions to decide upon civil and criminal cases take place in public in thepresence of the plaintis, the accused, witnesses, and other people, emphasisoriginal). During the years numerous articles were published invarious journals which gave dierent points of view regarding the exact con-stitution of such juries; who should be permitted to undertake jury service;and how they should be permitted to determine their verdict. And in spite ofdiering opinions upon the specics of how juries should operate, they wereunanimous in welcoming an end to the secret, written procedures and theirreplacement with public and open court sessions.

Both this openness and the move towards an adversarial court system canbe seen to be enacted in almost all of the detective stories from this earlyperiod. e works of all of the authors mentioned thus far feature examin-ing magistrates questioning victims (where possible), witnesses, and potentialsuspects in the presence of other people in an eort to get to the truth. Noneof their activities takes place in secret; the accused are informed of the sus-picions against them and given the chance to provide an alibi or prove theirinnocence; and the examining magistrates are never shown to employ dubi-ous methods of arriving at the truth, such as threats of physical violence. Onehallmark of these stories which clearly enacts this move towards an openlyadversarial process is their construction around a dialogic principle wherethe voice of the examining magistrate confronts and challenges those of aseries of witnesses or suspects. Direct dialogue features heavily as a means ofdramatizing the use of confrontation between opposing points of view as amethod of trying to arrive at the truth behind a crime. In Panovs Ubiistvov derevne Medveditse, for instance, the examining magistrate twice attemptsto force a confession out of the main suspect by bringing him face to face withthe victims orphaned daughter. In the presence also of the victims sister, thelocal priest, and twelve witnesses drawn from among the village elders, theexamining magistrate repeatedly addresses Grishanin forcefully and imploreshim to speak, to admit his guilt, and to tell the full story of the murder hehas committed. ere is a dramatic toing and froing between the voices of

Nashi domashnie dela, p. . In the article Nashi budushchie prisiazhnye in the April issue of Vremia, for example,

P. Tkachev considers that the introduction of trial by jury will bring justice closer to the peopleand will put an end to the peoples fear of the judicial system and rather inspire love and trust.In the Sudebnye ustavy noiabria article in Sovremennik in , the author outlines in greatdetail how juries will be constituted and how they will be asked to operate.



the examining magistrate and Grishanin until, nally, the suspect gives inand utters the word they have all been waiting for: vinovat (guilty). Suchadversarial dialogue is also a feature common to all of Shkliarevskiis storiesand is particularly evident in his Rasskaz sudebnogo sledovatelia. is work,and the investigation into the strangling of Nastasia Pylneva it narrates, isalmost entirely structured around a series of consecutive one-on-one inter-views between the examining magistrate and the various suspects: AleksandraLastova, the victims closest friend; Collegiate Assessor Zarubin, her guardian;the student Garnitskii who had been in love with her; her estranged husband;and then Aleksandra Lastova again. Intriguingly, however, just when it seemsthat the voice of the examining magistrate will assert its superiority by es-tablishing the truth behind events, Aleksandra Lastova rebels, changes hertestimony, and ensures that the narrative remains open-ended.In view of the tendency for detective stories to end with the revelation of the

investigators discovery of the crimes perpetrator, direct description of jurytrials is not particularly common in these stories. However, given the interestin this new judicial institution and the propensity for Russian detective storiesto record the outcome of trials and the punishment meted out, they do never-theless appear more frequently than in their Western counterparts. In PanovsTri suda ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala, for instance, the rst part of the storyconcludes with a detailed description of the trial of Nikandr Ichalov, who,while guilty of the the of the victims diadem, has been wrongly broughtbefore the court charged also with her murder. e narrator-detective recordshow almost the entire town tries to get hold of one of the tickets madeavailable to members of the public wishing to attend the trial. He appearsalmost to have read the sort of details contained in the publitsistika articlesas he recounts how the accused is led in; the list of jury members is read outwith twelve full members and two reserves; the roll of ninety-nine witnessesto be called is announced; and the court secretary reads out the accusations.He further describes how, at the close of the trial, in spite of Ichalovs protes-tations of innocence, the procurator insists on the incontrovertibility of theproof against him, and how the jury les back into the courtroom aer theirdeliberations to pronounce him guilty. However, normal practice is drama-tically interrupted when the victims best friend, Anna Bobrova, stands up inthe public gallery and announces that she is the one who is guilty of murderand not Ichalov. In spite of this rather unexpected revelation, the reader isnevertheless given a detailed insight into the functioning of the new Russianopen courtroom.Arguably the best-known literary depiction of the functioning of such a

criminal trial from this period is to be found in Dostoevskiis Bratia Kara-

Panov, Ubiistvo v derevne Medveditse, p. .


mazovy. Just as in Panovs story, the trial of Dmitrii Karamazov is presentedas the spectacle which everyone in town wishes to attend: tickets sell out andjurists from the length and breadth of Russia have diculty nding a seatin the courtroom. e similarities drawn between this criminal trial and apiece of theatre (where the ladies pull out their lorgnettes and are said to besatised with the show) are just one aspect of Dostoevskiis critical portrayalof the new judicial institution. e narrator informs the reader that the juristspresent are not in the least concerned with the moral aspects of the casebut only its sovremennaia-iuridicheskaia [storona] (modern legal [aspect]),while the president of the court is more interested in it as a produkt nashikhsotsialnykh osnov (product of our social principles); and he records howmany observers criticize the composition of the jury as hardly likely to be ableto judge a tonkoe, slozhnoe i psikhologicheskoe delo (subtle, complex, andpsychological case). And the performances of both the public prosecutorand most particularly the defence lawyer, Fetiukovich, are very obviouslysatirized. e latter, inspired by the real-life gure of Vladimir Spasovich,is said to have taken on the case only dlia slavy (for the glory) and issubsequently labelled a preliubodei mislei (corrupter of thought) by theimplied author for his ability to subjugate the truth to his beautifully craedoratory. Although Fetiukovich claims that the court dolzhna byt shkoloiistiny i zdravykh poniatii (must be a school of truth and rational ideas,

Dostoevskii depicts his performance as embodying all that he perceived to beinadequate and undesirable in the new system.In his Muzhniaia zhena: bytovoi ocherk, on the other hand, Timofeev is

careful to demonstrate how this new court can become an instrument of thepeople when he describes how humanely it treats the poisoner Irina. enarrator-detective explicitly reveals his reservations about the fact that Irinahas to be tried at the same time as the father-in-law who has repeatedly rapedher, and his fears that the court, in nding Pankratov guilty, will have littlechoice but to do the same with Irina. However, these fears prove to be mis-placed. And it is telling that the narrator chooses to tell the reader specicallythat the jurors have found Irina not guilty and have ignored Pankratovs so-cial status and importance to nd him guilty: Ne vyvezla sila kuplennykh zadengi ubezhdenii, otvergla ikh tselomudrennaia sovest prisiazhnikh (thestrength of convictions sold for money did not win out, the chaste conscienceof the jurors rejected them). Timofeev then, unlike Dostoevskii, shows how

Dostoevskii, Bratia Karamazovy, , . In his Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre

Dame Press, ) Andrzej Walicki notes that Dostoevskii was deeply suspicious of barristerswhom he accused of hypocrisy or, even, of simply lying for money (p. ).

Dostoevskii, Bratia Karamazovy, , . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Timofeev, Muzhniaia zhena, p. .



true justice can be served by the collaboration of these two new institutions:the examining magistrate in the pre-trial investigation and the members ofthe jury when the case comes to court.What the preceding discussion has attempted to show is that, at its very in-

ception in the s and s, Russian crime ction was not solely modelledupon the real-world events of the undoubtedly signicant legal reforms.Rather, crime ction supplemented such mimetic impulses by looking acrossgeneric boundaries towards non-ctional writing for its inspiration, makingpublitsistika an essential intermediary. As with other of the Great Reforms ofthe period, the judicial reforms of and generated a huge numberof column inches in publitsistika articles of the time. ese polemical articlesbrought an understanding and knowledge of the new legal landscape muchfurther into the public domain than the simple issuing of judicial acts coulddo on its own. However, this process of dissemination or popularization thentook a further signicant step forward as such discussions were brought to afar wider audience through their literary dramatization in ctional detectivestories. It was Tolstoy, writing in defence of Voina i mir [War and Peace],who claimed that the systematic deance of generic norms is a watchwordof Russian literature. It is undoubtedly the case that, at least in part, theearliest Russian detective stories were informed, certainly in terms of theircontent and sometimes in terms of their style, by these polemical articles.From publitsistika writings, Russian crime stories drew an explicit preoccupa-tion with contemporary socio-historical issues, particularly the attributes ofthe new detective gure that the reforms had introduced. In large part, theyalso helped to promote the positive image of the examining magistrate as aforce for good in Russian society which was championed in polemical journ-alism. While it might be claimed that early Russian detective stories are alsoinformed by other sourcespersonal experience, society gossip, and creativeimaginationthe role of polemical articles remains undeniable. And, in time,this became rather more of a two-way street. Although, on the whole, suchearly Russian detective stories garnered little critical attention from high-browjournals, more prominent works by native and foreign writers (Dostoevskiiand Gaboriau, for instance), as well as actual crimes and trials, were seizedupon by polemical critics as more material to be debated and dissected.

U S A C W Dostoevskiis Prestuplenie i nakazanie was reviewed and discussed in numerous journals and

from a variety of dierent angles; mile Gaboriaus detective novels were published and reviewedin Russia from the early s onwards. Dostoevskii himself wrote extensively about Frenchcriminal trials (Lacenaire, Lacoste) in Vremia in the early s.

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debating detectives: the influence ofpublitsistikaon nineteenth-century russian crime fiction

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