The discourse of law and the discourse of power in the works by Yury Dombrovsky

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the discourse of law and the discourse of power in the prose by Y.O. Dombrovsky. The authors have identified a number of aspects of law and power discourses in order to demonstrate how law and power, reproduced in the works by Y.O. Dombrovsky, can interact with socio-cultural realities. The study involved the axioms of law – fundamental legal principles that have developed because of centuries of law practice and have 7become statements that do not require proof. The analysis of a number of law axioms shows that in the totalitarian reality depicted by the author the law axiomatic is distorted, and fundamental legal laws cease to work. Attention was also drawn to the fact that court scenes are abstract in the prose by Y.O. Dombrovsky and the reasons for this absence are analyzed in the article. It was established that the court in his works can be depicted indirectly (through memories, protocols, etc.), but the hero himself does not participate in the court. In the controlled judicial system of the Stalinist period, the court disappears as an unnecessary instance, since the accused is guilty a priori. Due to the lack of a real advocateship in court, the arrested person can only defend himself if he makes a plea deal in order to get a shorter sentence. When studying the discourse of law and the discourse of power, we turned to the theory of speech genres by M. M. Bakhtin. We have identified and analyzed such genres of judicial and law discourse as the genre of interrogation, indictment, lawyer’s speech, arguments of the parties and protocol, as well as such imperative speech genres of power discourse as the genre of order, submission and possession. It was concluded that the characters by Y.O. Dombrovsky can oppose the ideas of stoicism to despotic power.