Greetings, fellow Karamazov readers! We’re finally at the book’s climactic sequence, the trial of Dmitri Karamazov in the murder of his father Fyodor. Everything in the book has been leading to this point, so buckle up! As always, feel free to participate regardless of how far you’ve gotten, but please keep spoilers labeled so that new readers have a chance to discover the material on their own.
Last week we looked at the literary demons that both pre- and post-dated Ivan’s delightfully evil little devil. This week Dostoevsky leaves such seemingly metaphysical questions behind and drops us right into one of contemporary Russia’s biggest debates: what is the purpose of a criminal justice system? To get there, he’s going to drag us step-by-step through the process...
Notes and Comments:
A few weeks ago we talked about the effect of Alexander II’s reforms on Russia, particularly the emancipation of the serfs. But the reform with the biggest impact on the novel we’re currently reading was the introduction of trial by jury, a system that Dostoevsky found himself, at best, highly ambivalent. Since we’re neck-deep in a trial (that some readers, including a few of our own, find a slog compared to the rest of the book), this would be a good time addressed Dostoevsky’s objections to the new system, objections he detailed in his Diary of a Writer, which is less a diary in the conventional sense and closer to the modern punditry blog that he published regularly for his readers. (Translations cited below are all from this edition.)
The Judicial Reforms were a major focus of his unease — they introduced trial by jury, new legal categories, and in contrast the Western law, the possibility of juries refusing to punish guilty parties — an unease which peaked with the 1878 acquittal of radical revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who had attempted to kill the governor of St. Petersburg. Unusually, the Zasulich trial spun on the unpopularity of her target and the violence inflicted afterward on the 28-year-old Zasulich herself (flogging), and the jury allowed her to walk despite the clear admission of guilt. Other conservative pundits took this as proof of the Great Reforms’ pernicious essence, while Dostoevsky was horrified not so much by the result (he envisioned a way of confronting her with her guilt that would somehow sidestep conventional punishment) as by her immense popularity and the seeming triumph of revolutionary terror against the state. The role of The People in making decisions with both legal and moral consequences would become one of the germs of The Brothers Karamazov (D. even uses some details from the Zasulich and other trials in this section of the book.)
Dostoevsky wrote a number of articles on crime and punishment, but let’s look at one in particular. In a May 1876 article, he responds to a reader who wonders at the author for not commenting on a recent trial in which a guilty woman, Nastasia Kairova, was acquitted of attempted murder of her lover’s wife on the basis of “illness”. Dostoevsky uses the letter as a prompt to lay out something like a theory of law in opposition to what he’s seen in the West.
The first is an epistemological problem: D. feels that modern legal concepts require juries to resolve questions that they are incapable of resolving. In the Kairova case, he objects to the question of intent as an issue impossible to adjudicate through evidence, accessible only to an omnipotent observer. We can’t possibly know what passed through Kairova’s mind as she held the razor to her rival’s throat, but we’re “pinned to the wall” in having to decide whether she really did intend to kill her. What if, at that moment, Kairova realized the great sin she was about to commit, and her hesitation was the reason the murder attempt “failed”? How can we judge her the same as someone who outright attempted but was thwarted by external factors? “One can only give an affirmative answer to [a question of intent],” he writes, “if one has supernatural, divine omniscience.”
Though the eventual verdict released Kairova on the basis of what we’d now call an insanity plea, another issue is that Dostoevsky has with this is his sense that Russians are incapable of not doing anything to extremes:
In the West the notion that a crime is very often only an illness makes a good deal of sense because people there discriminate carefully among crimes; but in Russia this same notion does not make sense at all because we do not discriminate at all, and everything, every sort of nasty villainy committed even by [gang members] we also accept almost as an illness…
Lest this seem like too much a compliment to the West, D.’s problem with this arrangement is that Russian intensity is dangerous only insofar as it amplifies what he calls “liberal” (read: Western) tendencies. The new legal code exacerbates this problem by reducing moral categories to legal ones and forcing the energies of the jury in the wrong direction. Correctly channeled, however, that intensity would lead to entirely different concepts of crime, guilt, and redemption in contrast to Western models.
In this, D. does have some faith in the potential of jury trials, provided that “the conscience of the jury be truly enlightened, truly firm, and strengthened by a sense of civic duty.” The reason he is less certain about the possibility of this transformation is that, where judges might see through rhetoric and jargon, juries are especially susceptible to legal linguistic fireworks that may incline them to either side of the Scylla and Charybdis of “harshness or pernicious sentimentality.” He describes the defense’s closing arguments in great detail as an act of theater, inappropriate for the material at hand, but pitched at sentimental affect that benefits his client more than any pursuit of the capital-T Truth. It also dehumanizes the victim in this case, whose own suffering is completely lost in the defense’s long account of Kairova’s great suffering. In effect, juries can be swayed by narratives that are disassociated both from Truth and from whatever it is we’re calling justice.
In the end, D. tells us, he’d be happy if Kairova was found guilty and released, because he believes that courts should be firm in their assessments of crime and merciful in their application of judgment. But “justice” is a meaningless word if the judicial system does not function as a “school of ethics,” and the kinds of categories in the legal code, the questions brought before juries, and the decisions made on these bases are at odds with the kind of ethical future he envisions for Russian society.
(In a typically Dostoevskian move, the article also digresses into a prophesy of Moscow as the eventual Third Rome that will serve as a moral pillar for the rest of the world. “The Great Russian,” he wrote, “is only now rising up to utter his word.” He takes this nationalism stuff a wee bit seriously. Also: he appends a comment that “Moscow” here is an allegorical entity, “so there is no cause for any Kazan or Astrakhan to feel offended.” Heh.)
I should note that D.’s objections aren’t limited to anti-Western nationalists. Half a century later, the very much non-nationalist Karel Čapek raises similar concerns in his brilliant novel Hordubal. In this, a crime is committed, the police investigate, the perpetrators are identified, and the jury finds them guilty. Conventionally speaking, this is a proper and correct application of processes, but Čapek leaves us with a feeling of unease that something is missing here, some understanding of the difference between the facts and the truth of the crime (and consequently, the appropriate application of “justice”) that the criminal justice system is either unequipped to handle or (in this case) that the people making up the jury are uninterested in pursuing. It’s hard to explain this without going into detail about the plot of the novel, but suffice to say that the epistemological questions of criminal justice, about which there are reams upon reams of academic writing, have also entered into fiction in a number of places that are otherwise not ideologically sympathetic.
Questions for Discussion:
An assumption of jury trials is that they consist of one’s “peers”. Who comprise the jury of Skotoprigonevsk’s finest, and why does this seem to bother the narrator so much? Should it? (in your own opinion, I mean)
Though D.’s narrator is largely omnipotent and uninvolved with most of the events of the novel, here he starts to stress his participation as an eyewitness of the trial and his poor memory for recording all the details. Why do you think this may be important?
How does Dmitri’s defense attorney counter all the “dangerous” witnesses who testify to Dmitri’s guilt? (In other words, what seems to be his general method of approach, rather than the specific questions he asks?) Why might this approach be important for D.’s larger points? Conversely, why is Doctor “I can make nothing of it!” Herzenstube asked to testify on Dmitri’s behalf?
Much as D. juxtaposed long monologues by Ivan and Zosima in the book’s first half, he now juxtaposes (very) long monologues by the prosecutor and defense attorney in the second. Since we’ve now read the first, what seem to be the cruxes of the prosecutor’s argument against Dmitri — not just in light of the material evidence, but as a philosophical argument about how to approach the topics before the jury? Knowing what you know about the events of the novel, how convincing does his argument seem to you?
For Next Week:
[In my best Mortal Kombat voice:] FINISH IT.
That’s right, folks… Only a few more chapters to go, and those of you reading for the first time can brag to your friends that you, too, conquered Mount Karamazov. I’d send you all ribbons if I could. Joking aside, though: this is a real accomplishment, so let’s knock out that final leg and celebrate next Monday!
I’d also like to continue the Book Club, if you all are willing. Let’s discuss this more in the comments...
PREVIOUS ENTRIES IN THE SERIES:
- Announcement
- Introduction
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
- Book 4
- Book 5
- Books 6-7
- Book 8
- Book 9
- Books 10-11.2
- Books 11.3-11.10