Slavica Tergestina 13 (2011)

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.

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 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 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”.

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.