'The Brothers Karamazov' and the fate of Russian truth: Shifts in the construction and interpretation of narrative after the Judicial Reform of 1864

Examining the relationships between legal and literary forms of discourse, this study addresses the extent to which the landmark Judicial Reform of 1864, which generated new types of legal narratives, established new sets of hermeneutic procedures, and empowered new classes of judicial interpreters, affected the construction and interpretation of non-legal narratives in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s. With the opening of Russian courts to the public for the first time in nearly seventy years, legal proceedings increasingly became the subject of first journalistic and then literary narratives; literary narratives began to adopt the narrative structures and rhetorical devices of legal narratives. The Russian detective story, fathered by A. A. Shkliarevskii, developed in this discursive environment. But the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly his last novel The Brothers Karamazov (1881), represents the apotheosis of a renewed relationship between literary and legal discourses in Russia.;The intricate narrative structure of book twelve of The Brothers Karamazov, in which a narrator self-consciously reconstructs his memories of Dmitri Karamazov's trial, harbors not only a parody of legal discourse, but also an incisive critique of narrative as a form of comprehension. The closing arguments of the prosecution and the defense underscore the imaginary and thus fictional quality of any narrative version of the past. For in a work where everyone wishes the death of his father, it is no coincidence that a lawyer counsels interpretative freedom while arguing that a parricide is not a parricide.;Meanwhile, Dostoevsky's representation of various responses to legal narratives by various narratees exposes realist conventions of narrative interpretation. Because many of these legal narratives constitute different summaries (and thus interpretations) of The Brothers Karamazov, the interpretative efforts of the characters and the narrator ironically reflect those of the implied reader, who must determine to what extent morality or aesthetics--instead of a search for truth--conditions his or her own hermeneutic strategies. In The Brothers Karamazov, therefore, Dostoevsky uncovered the metanarrative potential hidden in crime narratives--a potential for play, misreading, and indeterminacy that "post-modernists" would rediscover in the twentieth century.