Louise McReynolds is a professor at the University of North Carolina (USA) and now an affiliate researcher with the History Department at the EUSP. Her main research interests are middle class and leisure culture in Russia during the 19th century and pre-revolutionary period.
McReynolds published a book this year titled Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Cornell, 2013). In a lecture at the EUSP, McReynolds discussed how the genre of the Russian detective novel differs from that in the west, who the Russian Sherlock Holmes would have been, and how “pulp fiction” reflects social reality.
The Russian Sherlock Holmes was named Ivan Putilin, and he was the head of the detective force in St. Petersburg. He lived in the mid 19th century and is survived by his autobiography Sorok let sredi grabitelej i ubijts [Forty Years Among Robbers and Murderers], which was published in 1889. At the beginning of the 20th century there appeared a popular series of short stories by Roman Dobryi, under the title “Genij russkogo syska I. D. Putilin [The Genius of the Russian Detetctive I. D. Putilin].” In these stories the Russian detective even has his own Dr. Watson—Ivan Nikolaevich—who is his friend and helper, as well as the story’s narrator. Putilin was one of many heroes of the Russian crime genre whose creation was influenced by Western detective novels.
In the second half of the 19th century crime novels saw great popularity in Russia. At the beginning of the 20th century Russian popular fiction was strongly influenced by the so-called “Pinkertonites,” a boom in detective and adventure literature that emerged in the U.S. Many English and American books were translated, adapted or simply rewritten by Russian authors. However, stressed McReynolds, despite the fact that this borrowing was acknowledged, Russian literary criticism didn’t pay attention to the genre and a serious analysis of crime and detective literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has not been taken up until now.
McReynolds connects the relevance of the genre and its appeal to not only tabloid writers but also intellectuals to reforms of the judicial system in 1864. The most important aspect of these was the introduction of jury trials and the announcement of the transparency and independence of the judiciary. The revolution of 1905-1907 also left its mark in criminal novels.
In a vast amount of literature on murder McReynolds identifies two main genres—the detective novel and the crime novel. In Russia a clear preference was given to crime novels, that is, to a narration of the crime rather than its investigation. In the west, on the other hand, stories about the triumph of justice saw much greater popularity. This explains a basic cultural difference: Russian readers did not believe in the triumph of reason, and were more interested in individuals who cross the boundary of what is allowed, as well as their emotional processes. A canonical example of such a plot is Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In the Western detective novel McReynolds sees a manifestation of the rational tradition stemming from the Enlightenment.
In Russian criminal novels the criminal, as a rule, receives punishment not through justice, but either calls it upon himself (unable to withstand the pangs of conscience) or is punished by fate. Plots also frequently end in forgiveness, because in the Russian tradition a relevant question is who is really to blame—the perpetrator of a crime or the social milieu that forced him to do so? McReynolds illustrates her thesis with examples with two similar plots from a Russian and English novel. In the case of a mysterious poisoning the English detective finds the reason (an exotic snake) with the help of scientific methods, and the criminal—the uncle of the victim—dies, bitten by his own murder weapon. In the Russian version the detective discovers the poison (from an exotic flower) accidentally, while nearly half asleep. The criminal—also the uncle of the victim—is forgiven and simply disappears from his family’s life. It is because of these fundamental differences in resolution of conflict that Russian crime novels have not been translated into English. Western readers would be surprised, if not outraged, by this celebration of chance, fate, and emotion in a work of the crime genre.
McReynolds noted that there is a developing interest in the crime genre in contemporary Russia, especially in television shows. What is remarkable is that they borrow the Western model, in which an intelligent and brave detective punishes the criminal, while the Russian criminal-emotional model is poorly represented. At the same time, American shows with compelling and unpunished criminals such as “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” are popular worldwide. These obviously depart from the Western cannon, which, according to McReynolds, demonstrates disappointment with liberal ideas and fatigue with rationalism. “Usually, we Americans loved when evil was punished, like in shows on Channel 5!”
