Words on Trial: Morality and Legality in Frida Vigdorova’s Journalism
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Authors
Reich, Rebecca
Publication Date
2022Journal Title
Slavic Review
ISSN
2325-7784
Publisher
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Reich, R. (2022). Words on Trial: Morality and Legality in Frida Vigdorova’s Journalism. Slavic Review https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2022.149
Abstract
During the Khrushchev period, the journalist Frida Vigdorova charged Soviet society with a moral indifference that expressed itself through evasive language. Such language, she argued, claimed to exercise moral judgment, while in fact enabling both individuals and institutions to sidestep their own responsibilities. As the state enacted legal reforms aimed at raising society’s moral consciousness, Vigdorova applied this critique of language to the Soviet justice system. This study traces the evolution of that critique across her published as well as unpublished writings about legal and paralegal rituals of justice from 1955 to 1963. For Vigdorova, these rituals offered object lessons in society’s failure to combat indifference: evidence that even those institutions that the state charged with adjudicating morality could fall prey to evasive language. Her transcriptive style situated herself and her readers as personal witnesses to that language: a community of listeners gathered in space and time. Long before she produced her well-known account of Joseph Brodsky’s trial in 1964, Vigdorova presented journalism as a higher court that could call society to account.
Sponsorship
Leverhulme Trust
Funder references
Leverhulme Trust (RF-2019-317\1)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2022.149
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/334445
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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