“Schur’s exceptional, pathbreaking, and deeply scholarly book joins a group of recent studies interrogating the relationship between literature and the law, and argues that the writer and the lawyer evolved from being early allies to becoming, in the public’s view, the proverbial farmer and cowboy, a trend against which Russian trial lawyers, in particular, struggled to contend. Schur’s fascinating, penetrating analysis renders her book essential reading for both Slavists and students of the law and literature more generally. Read it! It’s a game changer.” —Robin Feuer Miller, author of Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey— -
“. . . a major contribution to both the history and the literary understanding of the time.” —Richard S. Wortman, author of The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History: Charismatic Words from the 18th to the 21st Centuries— -
“Russia’s tsarist-era judicial reforms gave rise to lawyers whose courtroom eloquence and literary accomplishments ought to have been a source of national pride, but that is not what happened. Anna Schur goes deeply and skillfully into the source material to explain the surprisingly negative reaction expressed by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Saltykov, and other writers towards lawyers who tried to realize Russian literature’s dream of a more just world.” —Kathleen Parthé, author of Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines
"Anna Schur’s excellent new book is a vital contribution to the study of the relationship between legal and literary culture (with implications that go beyond late Imperial Russia).... gracefully weaving together legal and literary studies from multiple disciplines, simultaneously laying out the problems in these fields that create the need for her study and extending, filling in, or critically challenging several strands of thought within those fields." —Brian Armstrong, The Russian Review
"Anna Schur brilliantly guides readers on a journey through writers’ scathing critiques of lawyers in nineteenth-century Russia. Scholars typically interpret these attacks as responses to lawyers’ unscrupulousness and greed or to cultural antagonism toward Western law, which contravened traditional Russian values. However, Schur’s book is the pioneer navigating the veritable battlefield on which lawyers and writers are vying for cultural authority." —Amy D. Ronner, Canadian Slavonic Papers— -