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Chapter Six - Approximations of Justice: The Novel in the Courtroom
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145 Chapter Six Approximations of Justice: The Novel in the Courtroom I N T H E P R E V I O U S chapter, we explored how the Dostoevskian “living soul”—the volatile, incalculable, unknowable self that he contrasts to the lifeless subject put forth by various forms of environmental determinism, physicalism, and psychological empiricism—is consonant with the view of spiritual transfiguration as a spontaneous, sudden event that is impossible to bring about by manipulating the self’s external environment . The self that, in the Underground Man’s turn of phrase, refuses to wish “by little tables” (po tablichkam) is equally impervious to attempts at being reformed by schedules, routines, and standardized procedures (Pss, 5:114). This chapter will continue to explore the implications of such a self for adjudication and punishment, this time focusing in particular on Dostoevsky ’s artistic approach to representing intention. Earlier, we considered Gorianchikov’s reflections that link the impossibility of perfectly calibrated punishments to the opacity of human interiority (see chapter 2). Here, we will explore how this opacity is exacerbated by indeterminacy and obscurity of motive and intention both in Dostoevsky’s novelistic selves and in their real-life counterparts that he describes in his nonfiction writings. The reason intention and motive matter is Dostoevsky’s view of the importance of guilt for punishment determinations (see chapter 2). And since for Dostoevsky intentions and motives are crucial for any appraisal of guilt, whether moral or legal, their indeterminacy inevitably results in the impossibility of perfectly accurate judgments or precisely fine-tuned punishments. Dostoevsky’s attention to the interior life of the self and to its relevance for guilt determination was consonant with the new approaches to adjudication introduced by the Judicial Reform of 1864. The liberal jurist A. F. Koni even encouraged his colleagues to look to Dostoevsky’s novels to learn how to delineate the internal life of the self more accurately, comprehensively, Chapter Six 146 and fluidly. Such delineations, he believed, would assist in making judicial and penal systems more effective. Dostoevsky himself was wary of bringing literary techniques into the courtroom. This skepticism was part of his overall unease with the reform that was growing with every passing year. Most likely, Dostoevsky believed that new courts were superior to the old ones, but his early enthusiasm was seriously dampened by a number of reservations.1 He was deeply concerned about the court’s deterioration into a place of entertainment and about its loss of decorum, dignity, and moral mission. He was dismayed by the exploitation of jury trials for the advancement of (for the most part, radical) ideological programs. He was troubled by the adversarial principles of the judicial procedure, which, he thought, corrupted the search for truth by subordinating it to the participants’ ambitions and personal agendas. And he was alarmed by what Harriet Murav calls the “self-consciously literary creativity” that came to dominate much of postreform courtroom oratory.2 Although Dostoevsky himself mobilized literary techniques in his defense of Ekaterina Kornilova, elsewhere he sharply criticized the literary flights of courtroom lawyers.3 Dostoevsky’s aversion to relying on novelistic techniques in building legal cases has been already addressed by critics. To move beyond those existing discussions, in this chapter I will probe further the reasons behind Dostoevsky’s wariness to suggest that its roots may be not only ethical or ideological but also aesthetic. I will suggest that Dostoevsky’s narrative aesthetics , the same aesthetics that Koni urges his colleagues to mobilize in the courtroom to arrive at more precise guilt and punishment determinations, in fact resists such real-life applications. The reason for this is that the modes of knowledge of the individual self underlying Dostoevskian aesthetics are inoperative in real-life courtroom situations. RUSSIAN FACE AND WESTERN CITIZEN In the early days of 1876, soon after his trip with Koni to visit the colony for juvenile delinquents, Dostoevsky makes the following record in notes for A Writer’s Diary: Besides being a citizen, a human being is also a person. The judge judges a citizen, and sometimes does not see the person at all. And therefore it is always possible that an impression of this invisible person will remain only with him, and the judge will see nothing in him. Even the law will not anticipate all the nuances. But to take away the person from the citizen and to keep only the citizen is not right: it would be worse than the...