The Poet with a Briefcase: The Russian Lawyer's Quest for the Professional Ideal

Abstract

This article explores the discourse of professional self‐presentation of the new Russian trial lawyer in the decades following the Judicial Reform of 1864. Reluctant to be seen as a mere expert, the lawyer presented himself as an artist and citizen and modeled elements of his professional image after the paradigm of the Russian writer. The entwining of the civic and the artistic in the lawyer’s self‐fashioning was part of his program to defend the profession before an often hostile public opinion and to shore up his professional and cultural authority. In bringing out this aspect of the lawyer’s quest for professional identity we gain a fuller understanding of the fraught relationship between Russian law and letters in the post‐reform decades. While traditionally, the writers’ critique of lawyers has been viewed as an expression of moral disapproval of lawyering and of a more abstract antipathy to law, the article suggests that the lawyers’ continued efforts to portray themselves as Russian writers’ surrogates in the courtroom was also a cause for concern and a reason for criticism.