The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection by Whitehead Claire (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 767 whereas in fact he cites a lengthy excerpt, but far from the whole poem. Such trifles, of course, detract next to nothing from the great value of this volume. Georgetown University Svetlana Grenier Whitehead, Claire. The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection. Legenda, Cambridge, 2018. xi + 266 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75.00: $99.00: €85.00. Claire Whitehead’s monograph, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection, is an intricately researched and fascinating exploration of the origins and development of a forgotten genre. Nineteenth-century crime writing is typically associated with France (Gaboriau’s locked-room mysteries) or Britain (Conan Doyle’s charismatic Sherlock); one of the earliest and most influential fictional detectives was Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853), ‘with his forefinger and his confidential manner, impossible to be evaded or declined’. Porfirii Petrovich, the sharp-eyed and manipulative judicial inspector who matches wits against the double murderer Raskolnikov in Dostoevskii’s 1866 novel, Crime and Punishment, is clearly Inspector Bucket’s Slav cousin (the homely TV detective Columbo might be their Californian descendant). Dostoevskii’s novel aside, imperial Russia’s contribution to the detective story genre is often assumed to be limited to Chekhov’s tales, ‘The Swedish Match’ (1883) and ‘The Hunting Party’ (1885). The former, acknowledged by Whitehead as the starting point of her own investigation, was reprinted as recently as 2017 in Foreign Bodies, an anthology in the British Library’s prestigious Crime Classics series. While the emergent ugolovnyi roman, or crime novel, certainly adapted Western narrative topoi and stock characters, its primary role was as a sort of cultural clearing-house in the wake of the 1864 reform of Russia’s judicial system — including, from 1860 onwards, the introduction of the official rank of judicial investigator. Porfirii Petrovich may have been Bucket’s Eastern counterpart, but more significantly, he and his fictional peers trialled the newly minted Russian justice system — in more ways than one. In six substantive chapters tackling questions of narrative authority, the production and management of suspense, and issues of metatextuality and parody, Whitehead marshals a primarily structuralist critical apparatus. Her narratological analysis illuminates aspects of nineteenth-century crime writing which previous critics have only broached. More than twenty years ago, Harriet Murav’s remarkable Russia’s Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998) argued that authors of crime fiction (even those who have been on the wrong side of the law, like Dostoevskii or the playwright Sukhovo-Kobylin) become complicit SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 768 with state authority in constructing society’s ruling organizational narratives. Revisiting Murav’s assertion, Whitehead demonstrates how the first, popular, and now-obscure Russian crime authors deployed narrative hierarchies to instil confidence in judicial authority while over-writing criminals’ unauthorized efforts to re-inscribe social norms. This new breed of investigators were required to earn a law degree; writers duly represented them as more educated than ordinary police. With honourable exceptions towards the turn of the century (like the historical police detective Ivan Putilin, whose cases were sensationally fictionalizedbymultipleauthors),Russiancrimefictionlacksbrilliantmavericks like Poe’s Dupin. Judicial investigators obey convention and protocol, often bolstering their narrative authority by consulting or citing written documents; they collaborate with doctors rather than priests, reinforcing the reassignment of civil authority in the real world. Citing Gary Saul Morson, Whitehead classifies most Russian crime writing from the 1860s and 1870s as ‘threshold literature’ — generically intermediate forms hovering between memoir, fiction and propaganda. Frequent use of the word zapiski (notes) in titles and subtitles served to blur the question of whether these texts were invented or recollected; convict memoirs exploited the same convention, as Louise McReynolds has observed in Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia(Ithaca,NY,2012).McReynoldsandWhiteheadconcurthatmostRussian crime fictions answer whydunit rather than whodunit; Whitehead argues that heteroglossia, coupled with what she calls ‘uneven omniscience’, are essential textual strategies to restore suspense to the text (for example, the reader knows who killed the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, but a combination of narrative polyphony and misleading subplots raise the possibility that the innocent Mikola may be punished for Raskolnikov...