Slavica Tergestina 13 (2011)

The novel Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966), written by Meša Selimović (1910–1982), a “Yugoslav” writer from Tuzla (Bosnia), consists of two parts: the first (the subject of our essay) speaks of the futility of one man’s resistance against a repressive system (from the 1st to the 9th chapter), and the second talks about the change that takes place within that man after he becomes a part of that very system (from the 10th to the 16th chapter). The main protagonist, Ahmed Nurudin, is the sheikh of a tekke, the head of a small religious order in a town in Ottoman Bosnia. The dervish, whose name means “light of the faith”, has deliberately removed himself from the day-to-day activities of society. At forty, he is a settled and respected member of the community, until pushed onto a new path by successive shocks: the arrest of his brother and an encounter with “Ishak“, a mysterious fugitive, who becomes the interlocutor in the sheikh’s interior dialogues, after he hides him one night in the monastery. These events lead dervish to question his previous certainties and the meaning of “right” and justice, and they also bring him into conflict with himself and the political authorities . As Nurudin attempts to find out what has happened to his brother and to intervene on his behalf, he is drawn into the “Kafkaesque” world of the Turkish political and religious authorities: he visits the local kadi, muselim and mufti, trying to effect his release, but each time he meets with either indifference or threats. The sheikh’s faith in the Ottoman system gradually weakens until finally he learns that his brother has been executed. The dervish shows himself to be a profoundly troubled man, a thinker rather than a doer, ill-equipped for the challenges he has to face. He struggles to find himself and maintain his integrity and dignity in this hostile political landscape. The novel also reflects Selimović’s personal experience of the loss of his older brother, a battalion commander, who was executed without trial by a partisan firing squad, in 1944. In Death and the Dervish the author describes the conflict between ideology and life, which leads the protagonist to feel morally on trial and to bring to trial the people he encounters, acting now as the accused, now as a witness, now as the judge. Nurudin ends up becoming part of the political system himself: ill-suited to that, he is resigned to his tragic fate. Each chapter of the novel opens with a quotation from the Koran, the first and the last being the same: “every man is always at a loss”.

The changes taking place today in Russian legislation, with all its new subtleties, raise the issue of making legal language comprehensible to the ordinary citizen. Dealing with this question largely depends on improvements in juridical procedures and making use of the best possible linguistic resources. At the same time, there are some areas of legislation where typically, on the one hand, there are profound changes in the laws themselves while on the other hand, they are governed by their relationship to this law. These areas include that of intellectual property rights, which are codified in the Russian Federation’s Civil Code, Chapter IV. The wording used in the chapter in question was used as material for discussion regarding the clarity and comprehensibility of legal texts. It was found that, in its legal formulations, this document uses an excessive amount of new and borrowed terms, approximate and ethical concepts, nominalizations and complex syntactic structures, thus making it more difficult to make sense of the legislation. In overcoming comprehension difficulties regarding new legislation a key role is played by the practical commentary which accompanies the law. Acting as a kind of text-broker, this commentary interprets and clarifies the law, thereby fostering the successful understanding of legal rights throughout the whole population. The commentary examined in the current study offers guidelines regarding recommendations for the application of provisions pursuant to Part IV of the Russian Federation Civil Code, issued by the Russian Federation Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This text is of linguistic interest in terms of its structure, core content and discourse techniques which aim to ensure that anything that cannot be understood by the layman is “filtered out”. The methods adopted in the comparative analysis of the legal–normative text and the commentary were those employed in other works analysing the reformulation of acts in different forms and types of communication. The unit of analysis adopted was the minimum commentary unit – the main component of any commentary text. In the Guidelines the size of the unit may vary, extending over one or more sentences or even paragraphs. It is made up of various combinations of the following components: a reference to a commented-on text, a direct quote from a legal text, a reformulated norm (with or without indication) and the actual commentary itself, as well as metacommunicative devices accompanying other components of the unit which is being commented on. This article offers an analysis of some of the most productive types of reformulating techniques found in the Guidelines. These are principally: exemplification, renaming, syntactic simplification and rearrangement, enumeration and precision.

The relationship between law and literature, especially law and theatre, is as far as their tradition is concerned no doubt just as old as our western-style culture. The fact however that we are at all able to speak about a relationship which intrinsically means distinguishing between law and theatre, politics and aesthetics, and last but not least fact and fiction in a profound way is the specific result of a process of systemic differentiation. In this light the Moscow show trials from 1936 to 1938 contrarily prove to be a paradigm of how the differentiation between law and theatre – regarded as separated parts of society – and their cultural and logical distinction dissolves in favour of a unification that also can be considered as a total amalgamation. An amalgamation characteristic of 1930s Soviet culture in so far as in all of their spheres the boundaries between fact and fiction, theatre and political life, literature and reality disappear. The amalgamation of law and theatre in the Moscow trials can be displayed by focusing on their juridical frameworks in terms of the paradoxical structures of political and juridical ,decisionism‘ (an expression established in jurisprudence by the German Carl Schmitt in the first decades of the 20th century) on one hand and the methods of constructing reality in accordance with the theory of Social Realism on the other including the experiments on stage of the so called agitsudy in the 1920s. Against the background of a double bound theatrically and juridically based non-differentiation of law and theatre in Soviet culture, the Moscow show trials – directed by Stalin and conducted by the general prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky – work as a social-realistic machine to eliminate the self-constructedenemy in the fictitious and actual arranged space of a stage-court and operate as monstrous plays of a theatrical transgression.

Radomir Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death has the characteristics of a novel, an autobiographical essay and a philosophical treatise. The protagonist of the novel, Father, professor of Civil Law, lives a life paved by the rules founded on Descartes’ rationality: for him, to serve the Law means to serve Order, perfect legality, repetition. Son admires his Father, but at the same time fears his infallibility and suffers from his tyranny of law, order and habit. In the Son’s eyes, Father is simultaneously almighty law and fear of law, as well as the law that terrorizes everyone around him. Everything changed in the 1990s when chaos ruled the outside world, Serbia and Belgrade: Son endeavoured to establish with this man of form and order such intimate relationships that he could not have achieved during Father’s life, because the Father was Law itself and the Son always and only an imperfect(ed) Disciple. The image related to Father–Lawyer or rather to Law as the art of equilibrium, is the image of a bicycle with the front wheel turned to the left which frequently reappears in the novel. Both in this novel–treatise and in his earlier works, Konstantinović expressed familiarity with postmodern thinking and the philosophical concepts of Montaigne and Pascal; one of the founders of scepticism, Montaigne, witnessed the crisis of values and heralded the impossibility of reaching the truth and the absolutes, while Pascal was doubtful of the proof of bare evidence, placing belief in irrational sensations above the rational conviction. However, in the 1990s one had to find a space also for Descartes, the author of the treatise on method, reason and the value of law. The Son now knows that Pascal’s world belongs to what is direct, to the market, „since directness kills: naivety has bloodyhands“. He understands that Father’s world of rules is closer to him, that the world of dignity, rhetoric, equilibrium and law is closer than the law of directness and the world that lacks legal organization. In the overwhelming darkness the Son first repudiated Montaigne, then Pascal. Descartes remained. Father’s Descartes. When in 1989 Jacques Derrida thought for the first time of a parallel between literature, philosophy and law, he emphasized the precision of the English language in the definitions of the functioning of law: „to enforce the law“ reminds us that justice cannot be properly of the law or right in law if it does not possess force or refer to force from the start. At the beginning of justice there was logos, word or language, but this does not contradict another of Derrida’s statements: in the beginning there was force. And there, when discussing law and force, law as the force, Derrida brings from oblivion the philosophers most prominent in Konstantinović’s work: Descartes, Pascal and Montaigne. Not only with the first, but with the other two as well, Derrida finds the term: the mystical basis of authority, which refers to the authority produced by law and is the result of law. „Laws are not rightful in themselves, we do not respect them because they are rightful but because they possess authority.“ We are faced with two beginner’s works: for the first time Derrida enters in deliberations about the relations between law, literature, philosophy and deconstructivism, while Konstantinović writes a novel– treatise, new in terms of structure and content (and still unperceived), where he explicates the ideas which Derrida deals with more densely and in a philosophical framework in his American Lectures. Derrida propagated the concepts which Konstantinović’s Son–narrator would present in his imaginary discussions with his Father and in his quotations from the thinkers quoted by Derrida. As if the author, Radomir Konstantinović, himself inclined to associative references and quotations applied as verifications of the narrative, believed that the crucial fact in his novel is that the main protagonist is a lawyer, the one who writes the law, defines legislations and deals with legal justice.

Slavica Tergestina was founded in 1987 at the University of Trieste by scholars of the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (SSLMIT – Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori). After the introductory volume published in 1987, the journal appeared regularly beginning in 1994. Since then, eighteen volumes have been published, adding up to over 250 articles written by researchers from different countries (mostly Russian, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian and Italian Slavic scholars). The volumes were reviewed in several scientific publications in Russia, Italy, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia. Some volumes focused on a monographic topic: Наследие Ю.М. Лотмана, 1996; Славянские языки и перевод, 1997; Художественный текст и его гео-культурные стратификации, 2000; Литературоведение XXI века. Письмо – Текст – Культура, 2002, Law & Literature, 2011; The Great Story, 2012; Slavia Islamica, 2013; The Yugoslav Partisan Art, 2016. Most of the articles published so far deal with the cultural realm of the Slavic world from the perspective of modern structuralist, semiotic and cultural methodological approaches, but the Journal Slavica TerGestina remains open to other approaches and methodologies.

The first section outlines the March 2001 arrests of National Bolshevik activists who had procured machine guns and explosives, obeying orders, it was claimed in the ensuing investigation, of their party leader, the cult-author Eduard Limonov, and Sergei Aksenov, editor in chief of the party newspaper Limonka. The two were subsequently arrested and accused not only of the illegal acquisition of weapons (Criminal Code of the Russian Federation §222) but also of founding an armed group (§205), of preparing acts of terrorism (§205) and of instigating an uprising destructive of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation. The section outlines media reactions to the arrest of “the well-known writer Limonov” and examines a polemical open letter composed behind bars by Limonov in which he accuses society of indifference. By comparing his own case with that of Iosif Brodsky and bringing discredit upon the latter, Limonov pursues the somewhat contradictory goals of appropriating the symbolic capital of the dissident movement and simultaneously destroying one of their central myths. The “hypertrophied literary political nexus” (Parté 2004, 1) becomes manifest in its most aggressive incarnation: the writer-revolutionary. The second section goes back to Walter Benjamin’s characterization of political radicalism among the bohemians of Baudelaire’s Paris. It emphasizes Limonov’s deeply felt kinship with Baudelaire, asking whether the former’s project can be viewed as an instance of radical aesthetic subjectivity in the tradition of the avant-garde. To my mind, to decide whether Limonov’s is really a political or merely an aesthetic project is too complex a problem to solve satisfactorily at the present time. Providing a summary of scholarly treatises on the problem, I argue that Walter Benjamin’s notions of ‘aestheticization of politics’ and war in a fascist context can serve as points of departure in future research. Another useful notion might be ‘myth’; it has been addressed on the one hand by French philosophers Nancy and Lacoue-Lebarthe, who further develop Benjamin’s above mentioned notions, and on the other hand by Olga Matich in her psychoanalytically informed analysis of Limonov’s more recent writing. Let me urge caution in the use of these leads, as we are dealing here with aesthetics, however irrational and repellent they might be, that are not state-controlled, but rather serve young people, freely representing their marginality. After thus bracketing larger questions, I devote the third chapter to the core interest of the article: the question as to whether Limonov’s terrorism was judged to be a gory reality or the trial was merely and purposely addressing fiction. The strategy of the prosecution was to treat speech acts as signifying a bloody reality, while Limonov, facing several years in prison, suggested the speech acts’ rhetorical nature. The court’s decision followed Limonov’s suggestion and acquitted him and Aksenev of the charges of terrorism and instigating an insurrection. Moreover it emphasized that the prosecution seemed rather inclined to construe a conspiracy. The last chapter explores in depth one of the main pieces of evidence brought forward by the prosecution: the “Theory of a Second Russia.” This text, which was attributed to Limonov by the prosecution, but was in fact authored by a Latvian regional party leader, was published in party bulletin NBP-Info № 3, devoted to the ideology and political perspectives of Eurasianism. The text imagines an uprising of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan and the building of a second free and wild Russian state that would in the long run conquer the first state. Limonov has emphasized that this text was received for a column of Limonka devoted to organizing a competition among proponents of revolutionary projects. This competition was announced by the post-/ conceptualist poet Dmitry Pimenov, who himself contributed a couple of very surrealistic revolutionary projects. The competition, in encouraging imagination of the improbable, was a striking example of the then virulent blurring of literary and political genres. The exotic potential of the imaginary Second Russia imaginary is then further developed in Limonov’s book of prison lectures, A Different Russia. Limonov’s vision includes a touch of aestheticization of violence that is analyzed at the end of the article. I argue that a state in Limonov’s myth is a violent father figure admired and loved at the same time, an ambivalence which makes positioning Limonov in the field of politics a difficult task.

In 1956 the novel “Will” was published in Bulgaria, written by Mitko Gorchivkin. It was modelled on Soviet novels such as those written by N. Ostrovski and B. Polevoy – the main character of the Bulgarian novel had a real prototype – a boy who had lost his legs during the bombings in Sofia and by the strength of his will was able to learn to write and draw. The conformity with the doctrine of socialist realism – depiction of “truth of life” and, accordingly, the creation of characters to serve as models, guarantees the success. But, ironically, the principle of authenticity played a nasty trick on the author: several years after the publication the author was sued and had to give a part of his fee to his prototype. This is an example of the unexpected effect of: 1) the relationship between life and literature in socialist realism and 2) the contradiction between propaganda “idealism” motivating the wish for glorification (the man himself looks for an author to depict his life) and material interest.

In my text “‘Sud nad iskusstvom’ or How the court case against the exhibition Forbidden Art 2006 turned from a legal action into a moral one” I am analyzing certain strategies of the prosecution counsel, which made this legal action appear as a theater play. The curator of the exhibition Andrei Erofeev and the director of the exhibition venue, the Andrei Sakharov Center in Moscow, Juri Samodurov were sued by different representatives of orthodox organizations and charged with incitement to religious and national hatred under Art. 282, Par. 2b. In 2010 they were found guilty. The court case itself at various points very much resembled a theater play put on stage – starting with a “casting” of the witnesses through the Internet, cheat sheets for the witnesses with the text of their testimonies in the courtroom and coming to an end with comments and applause from the audience for their performances. Due to its resemblance to a play in the courtroom the trial of Erofeev and Samodurov is highly reminiscent of the Soviet show trials, which were consciously based on theatrical features such as a more or less set script. One can cite numerous interferences in the court case against Forbidden Art 2006 and the soviet show trials in terms of their theatrical (not political) features, among them letter and media campaigns generating a specific rhetoric serving the aim to characterize the “inner enemy” of the state. But in terms of the legal action against the organizers of the exhibition Forbidden Art 2006 , it was not only individuals who were charged for the purpose of identifying an inner enemy, as was the case in the Soviet show trials, but contemporary art as a whole. Herein lies a significant parallel between today’s trial and the predecessors of the show trials – the mock trials. The mock trials of early Soviet times were theatrical plays with amateur actors and dramatized legal proceedings to be taken as actual legal precedents. Until the early 1930s the fictional courtroom of the mock trial concerned itself with the creation and maintenance of new socialist morality. Therefore mock trials were not legal cases but moral cases. As they served the creation of new Soviet moral norms, the trial against Forbidden Art 2006 served the creation of new (traditionalistic and orthodox) artistic norms. The trial of Erofeev and Samodurov (and also other trials of artists and curators in today’s Russia in general) is therefore a moral case against contemporary art as a single social and cultural phenomenon, which deals irreverently with popular religious and national symbols in a way radically opposed to a traditionalistic approach to these symbols. One gets the impression that the orthodox society claims not only the exclusive right to interpret and utilize these symbols but also the power to decide what is acceptable art and what is not. This trial was designed to make an example to manifest aesthetic categories of art production as contemplated under the law.

The recently published volume The Concept of Equity. An Interdisciplinary Assessment (Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2007), edited by Daniela Carpi, is a good example of the Law and literature approach in the studies of English literature. However, this approach calls for further assessment in three particular problem areas, which this paper attempts to address. It first has to be pointed out, that literary criticism is essentially foreign to the theory of law, even though some parallels do exist, when both fields are viewed historically. The second problem is the understanding of equity itself: it calls for differentiation between external equity, which can be viewed as an alternative to common law, and internal equity, which is an in independent factor of fairness, even though external equity – as shown in the case of English literature – often becomes internal in relation to the law. The third topic is the possibility of a different story of equity: the one that is not based on the opposition between good equity and bad law, but confronts the concepts of bad equity the good law.

The article explores, through the case of Martin Kasarda’s novel (azda) Posledná večera (1991) and the ensuing controversy and complaints of public insult against the author and the publishers by some members of the Slovak Parliament, the article explores the difficult process of democratization in Slovakia during the period following the end of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The author focuses on the clashes between two fundamental civic rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and between culture and politics. The article compares the Slovak case with other contemporary situations such as complaints against Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ and the issue of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.