Dostoevsky’s time: legal culture, family, and literature in post-reform russia

This dissertation examines the intersection of literature, law, family culture, and social morality in post-reform Russia, focusing on the impact of Alexander II’s Judicial Reform of 1864. It argues that the new public court became not only a legal institution but also a cultural stage on which Russian society negotiated changing norms, values, and ideas of justice. At the center of the study are three criminal trials from 1876, the cases of Kairova, Kronenberg, and Kornilova, each of which reveals tensions surrounding gender, family, childhood, punishment, and moral responsibility in late Imperial Russia. Through close analysis of judicial records, newspaper coverage, and journalistic commentary, the dissertation reconstructs the cultural and emotional climate of the 1870s and shows how these legal dramas shaped public debates on crime, guilt, and social order. A central focus of the dissertation is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s engagement with these trials in Diary of a Writer and The Brothers Karamazov. It demonstrates how Dostoevsky transformed real judicial material into literary and philosophical reflection, turning legal cases into vehicles for exploring guilt, repentance, justice, and redemption. In his work, the family emerges as a moral space in which conscience and responsibility are formed, while the court becomes a metaphor for Russia’s spiritual and social future. By combining microhistorical analysis with approaches from literary criticism, family history, and law and literature, the dissertation shows how judicial narratives illuminate the moral imagination of nineteenth-century Russian society and how Dostoevsky reworked them into enduring philosophical categories.