Following its defeat in the war in Crimea in 1856, the Russian Empire undertook a series of wide-ranging reforms aimed at modernizing the state in order to become a more successful military power. Under its new Tsar, Aleksandr II, who ascended to the throne in 1855, reforms were proposed to not just the military but also to the civil service and education.
Possibly the most significant reform was the Emancipation of the Serfs, promulgated in 1861, which ended the feudal system that had existed in the Russian Empire for centuries. In part informed by the fear that the Emancipation would lead to civil unrest with which the existing police force would be unable to cope, and in part as a response to the outmoded nature of the legal system in the Empire at that time, two significant legal reforms were also passed in the early 1860s.
The first, in 1860 itself, introduced into the Russian legal landscape the new figure of the sudebnyi sledovatel’ (judicial investigator). He (and it always was a man because the legal education that was a prerequisite for the job was not available to women until 1911) was responsible for conducting the investigation after the discovery of a crime and of presenting a dossier of evidence to the local procurator for a decision about whether the case should go to trial.
Judicial investigators enjoyed considerable powers including: securing and examining crime scenes; interviewing witnesses and suspects under caution; subpoenaing other witnesses or suspects to appear; organizing ‘ochnye stavki’ (face-to-face interrogations) between two witnesses whose testimony did not align; remanding suspects to custody. Without the introduction of the figure of the judicial investigator, it is unlikely that crime fiction would have begun to have been written in the early 1860s in the Russian Empire.
The second legal reform, in 1864, introduced a much more open system of justice within the Empire. In place of secretive, written procedures in which it was possible for a suspect to be remanded to custody and brought to trial without knowing which crime they were accused of, the post-reform system was based on a greater degree of openness, including the crucial introduction of trial by jury in a public courtroom. Early Russian crime fiction is often as interested in the conduct of trials as it is in the process of investigation.
These two legal reforms are significant factors in the development of a tradition of crime fiction within the Russian Empire. Not long after the reforms were debated in journalism by rival factions, works of crime fiction in Russian began to be published, and quickly found significant readerships.
The very first works of crime fiction published in the Russian Empire were authored by Nikolai Sokolovskii and published in Fedor Dostoevskii’s journal Vremia (Time) in 1862. Thereafter, various of these texts (some of which recount criminal investigations whilst others relate the judicial investigators visit to convicts in prison) were published as a 500-page collection, Prison and Life: From the Notes of an Investigator in 1866.
1866 is the same year that Fedor Dostoevskii published what is likely the most well-known work of Russian crime fiction, Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment). Dostoevskii’s novel is unusual amongst early works in the Russian tradition for being narrated not by the judicial investigator, Porfirii Petrovich, but by an uninvolved narrator who seems to be most closely aligned with the murder, Rodion Raskolnikov. Nevertheless, the empathy that both the narrator and the investigator show for Raskolnikov is in keeping with early Russian crime fiction conventions.
The 1870s saw the genre of crime fiction in the Russian Empire really take off in terms of numbers of publications and the size of the readership. 1872 saw the publication of Nikolai Timofeev’s collection of seven stories, Zapiski sledovatelia (Notes of an Investigator) as well as Petr Stepanov’s volume, Pravye i vinovatye (The Innocent and the Guilty).
In the late 1870s and through the 1880s, the most prolific Russian-language crime writer was Aleksandr Shkliarevskii, who authored some four dozen crime stories during this period. Shkliarevskii had himself been a provincial court reporter before moving to St Petersburg to pursue his academic dreams, and he wrote to Dostoevskii, professing his admiration for him and his writing.
Also in the 1870s, Semyon Panov published five high-quality crime stories, including Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala (Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball) (1876) which formed the inspiration for Adlam’s graphic novel, The Russian Detective.
Female crime writers appeared on the scene at a slightly later stage, producing numerous works that were hugely popular with readers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Arguably the two most notable are Kapitolina Nazar’eva who wrote over thirty works of crime fiction, including many long novels, and Aleksandra Sokolova, whose novels include Bez sleda: ugolovnyi roman (Without a Trace: A Judicial Novel (1890) and Spetaia pesnia: iz zapisok starogo sledovatelia (The Song Has Been Sung: From the Notes of an Old Detective) (1892).
Female crime writers are the subject of Claire Whitehead’s next monograph, Russia’s First Female Crime Writers, 1860-1917 and the topic of an ongoing creative collaboration between Whitehead, Adlam and Mona Bozdog (hybrid / immersive experience specialist and Lecturer in Immersive Experience Design, University of Abertay).