The authors in this collection draw from conceptualizations of criminality in a variety of fields, including sociology, law, criminology, penology, medicine, criminal anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, journalism, literature, and literary studies. They also benefit from an investigation of criminal-justice and crime-fighting policies, above all in Russia, both before and after the Revolution of 1917, and diachronically in comparison with European countries. Their approaches to history range from social history to discourse analysis and from the history of science and to new imperial history.
Part I focuses on late imperial Russia. Marina Mogilner argues that intellectuals, professionals, and activists devised a panoply of modernizing discourses of normativity and deviance as they sought to categorize and master the Russian Empire’s extraordinary ethnic, religious, and developmental diversity. Although most of them eschewed Cesare Lombroso’s criminal-anthropological concept of the born criminal, its essence was often expressed in such categories as atavism, survival, irrationality, and primitivism,...