The Legal Sketch: Journalism as Justice in Literaturnaia Gazeta

• In Event: Law and Legality II: Concepts and Narratives of Soviet Legality

Abstract

Journalism in the post-Stalin period was conceptualized as an educative endeavor that filled the gap left by a justice system that had failed to account for morality and humanity. Liberal journalists produced polyphonic texts that critiqued both lawlessness and the law as only literature could do: by capturing the subjective experience of life itself. Yet in doing so, they harnessed literature to a tutelary stance that positioned them as a moral supplement of the judiciary. Journalism was thus both limiting and facilitating of the Soviet justice system, since even when it critiqued that system, it situated itself as a counterweight that could balance out the system’s amorality. This paper presents the emergence of the “legal sketch” (sudebnyi ocherk) genre in Literaturnaia gazeta as an aesthetic response to this ethical predicament: a blend of legal and literary narration through which journalists negotiated their relations with the state and asserted their own judicial authority.

Author

• Rebecca Reich, U of Cambridge (UK)