Like many of today’s true crime authors, filmmakers and podcast hosts, Dostoyevsky wrote about crime (in both his fiction and journalism) as a way to uncover the lapses and deficiencies, as he perceived them, in the legal code. Unlike contemporary consumers of true crime, who find themselves in the middle of a larger national conversation about police brutality and racial bias in sentencing, Dostoyevsky was writing at a time of tremendous enthusiasm and hope regarding the future of Russian jurisprudence. In 1864, Czar Alexander II instituted sweeping changes to the legal code, the most radical of which was the introduction of the jury trial. Dostoyevsky shared the country’s excitement over the changes, writing to a friend: “We will have just courts everywhere. What a great regeneration that will be! (… I keep thinking and dreaming of all these things, and my heart beats faster over it.)”
Dostoyevsky himself had been victim to an overzealous judicial system. In 1849, he was…
