Born to Be Criminal ― The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union. Interdisciplinary Approaches

This collection of essays explores the continuities and disruptions in the perceptions of criminality, its causes, and ways of fighting it in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. It focuses on both the discourse on criminality and thus the conceptualization of criminality in various disciplines (criminology, psychiatry, and literature), and penal practice, that is, different aspects of criminal law and anti-crime policy. Thus, the volume is markedly interdisciplinary, with authors representing a variety of approaches in history and literary studies, from social history to discourse analysis, from the history of sciences to text analysis.

Riccardo Nicolosi is professor of Slavic literatures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich. His latest publications explore the rhetorical and narrative interfaces between literature and science.

Anne Hartmann is an assistant researcher and lecturer in the Slavic department at the University of Bochum. In her current research she concentrates on Western intellectuals visiting the Stalinist USSR and on Soviet labor camp literature.