The Reformer - Stephen F. Williams

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been a case where Plevako and Maklakov opposed each other.27) While he had good reasons for not apprenticing with Plevako, he regarded him as “the first lawyer in Russia” and noted that his name had become in popular speech a generic word for a master of eloquence and law, as in, “Find another plevako.”28 As both were famous orators of the era, the St. Petersburg Society of Lovers of the Oratorical Arts naturally sought out Maklakov to speak at a gathering in honor of Plevako after his death in 1908.

      Maklakov speaks with some awe of Plevako’s “ability to fluently find the necessary words and form them into correct and flowing phrases.” “He never had to search for words or think over phrases. The words in an obedient crowd poured into perfect sentences, perfectly expressed thoughts.” In one case a prosecutor in summation made a stupid statement, and Plevako wrote on his scratch pad the single word “Fireworks.” When Plevako reached the issue in his response, he addressed it with a true fireworks of thoughts and words, including “quotes from the Gospel, reliance on statutes, examples from the West, a summons to the memory of Alexander II.”

      Plevako prepared drafts ranging from a complete speech to notes of a few words, but wherever his preparation fell on that spectrum, his final words bore only a slight relation to what he had written. Often the whole structure of the speech changed. He might use a successful expression or a pointed phrase from the preparations, but those were the exceptions, which only underscored the general rule.

      After a case on which they had cooperated, Plevako was preparing an appellate brief, and Maklakov asked him to send him drafts. He did so—a whole slew of drafts (five or six) successively typed out by Plevako on his Remington. All were without strikeovers or revisions, yet all were quite different and had plainly been started afresh. When Maklakov spoke to him about it, Plevako said it was always easier for him to start from the beginning. He acted with words, says Maklakov, “the way a rich man might casually throw money to the wind.”

      As Plevako had no need for advance preparation to find the necessary words, what purpose did his notes serve? Only, says Maklakov, to assure himself that he had an abundance of material. As a result, if a new topic struck him during a speech, he could leave his plan without fear or regret.

      When Plevako lapsed from spontaneity his oratory paid a price. Maklakov cites his summation in M. A. Stakhovich’s suit against Prince Meshcherskii, a high-profile, politically sensitive libel case on which the two cooperated. Evidently nervous about the political implications, Plevako hewed fairly closely to his text, and in Maklakov’s view the speech suffered from length and ornateness, drawbacks in Plevako’s writing. Though very good, it fell short of his usual work. In another situation, Plevako sent a reporter a segment of a speech that had been written (or at least polished) after the speech was delivered; Maklakov thought it “a cold-blooded creation of the office, which lay like a pale patch on the brilliant background of improvisation.”29

      Maklakov seems never to have described his own methods. Apart from his awe of Plevako’s spontaneity, there are other clues to Maklakov’s approach—a preference for knowing in advance fairly exactly what he would say. His friend and fellow Kadet deputy in the Duma, Mikhail Chelnokov, told a mutual friend that on the eve of his speeches Maklakov would often go to him and deliver the next day’s speech with the same voice and urgency as he would later use from the Duma tribune.30 This suggests preparation down to the finest detail. Georgii Adamovich, who was Maklakov’s first Russian biographer and had known him and many of his contemporaries, reports that listeners were divided, some believing Maklakov memorized every word and every detail, such as pauses for thought, and others believing that he could deliver a lengthy speech with advance preparation of only its general content.31 Whatever the method (likely a combination of the two), the effect was one of conversational spontaneity. Vaclav Lednitskii, son of the Lednitskii for whom Maklakov almost apprenticed, affirms that Maklakov could write and deliver a speech so that it sounded like the spoken, rather than the written, word.32

      In his reminiscence, the younger Lednitskii shares with us an eccentric detail of Maklakov’s life. Summer and winter, he reports, Maklakov used to wear a Russian cap, which, with his beard, gave him the appearance of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Russian—hardly the convention for an up-and-coming member of the bar in the twentieth century. When he came to Paris in 1917 as ambassador-designate of the Russian Provisional Government, he replaced the cap with a beret.33

      Maklakov’s memorial address on Plevako ranged far beyond his oratory. Painting a picture of a fellow lawyer, a deeply patriotic Russian, a public figure, and a friend, the talk also portrays the portraitist himself and his time. As a foil for describing Plevako, Maklakov uses Vekhi (Landmarks, or Signposts), a famous book published the same year as his address, which skewered (or sought to skewer) the Russian intelligentsia. Without endorsing the book’s accuracy, Maklakov notes a number of attributes that it ascribed to the intelligentsia, most notably irreligion and lack of national feeling. He argues that Plevako lay at the antipodes from Vekhi’s characterizations. Plevako was, in fact, highly religious and dedicated to the Orthodox Church, giving it large sums of money. But at the same time he was an ardent defender of the Old Believers in the face of their persecution by the church and the regime, and was reverent toward Tolstoy’s theological works. For him, defense of religious freedom did not grow out of indifference to religion. Maklakov suggests he had a loose affinity for Tolstoy’s view of the state: “By instinct [Plevako] was an anarchist, though intellectually he understood the need for the state.”34

      Besides the implicit anarchism, Maklakov depicts Plevako’s ability to form a bond with the sinner, who, in his profession, was often the defendant. “He could penetrate the interest, the grief, the suffering of whoever he was defending. . . . He immediately saw what was best in a person, what to others might be invisible.” And more broadly, in terms echoing the “Grand Inquisitor” passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Maklakov writes, “There was nothing that could make him sacrifice a person: no belief in the saving character of any specific form of government, no devotion to doctrine, none of the intolerance arising out of such devotion.” Adamovich remarked that in Maklakov’s summation for Setkin, pleading that even a verdict of acquittal could not whitewash him, his spirit and tone were Plevako’s.35

      In addressing Plevako’s sense of national feeling, Maklakov tells the story of a winter trip the two took to defend a case.

      The harness came undone. I was angry not only that we were going to be forced to freeze in the field, but because all this happened close to the station, where there had been time to check how well the horse was harnessed. Plevako began to comically describe how the muzhik [peasant] got up in the morning, saw that the harness was bad, but hoped to get to the station; but when he got to the station he noticed that it nearly held, and hoped that he could make it to the farrier, and so forth. He preferred Russian thoughtlessness to American enterprise or German precision.36

      While Maklakov may have felt more irritation than Plevako at the peasant’s haphazard ways, he clearly shared Plevako’s affection for the Russian people and their way of life. This was part of what it meant, for both of them, to love Russia.

      In Plevako’s case, sympathy for casual peasant ways may have arisen partly from identification. “His vagueness was legendary.” Once, having asked people to his home, he found it necessary to change the time and place and then arranged meetings with them for another time, but in three different places. “At the named hour he was at still a fourth place. This sort of thing made him enemies, and led to unflattering legends, but only among those who didn’t understand him. Many could not, and paid for it [in loss of the rewards of his company].”37

      Maklakov’s talk conjures up a Plevako who, far more than a brilliant lawyer, was a great soul.

      You can teach yourself much—logic, and rhetoric and real eloquence. But it’s impossible to teach yourself such an understanding of life, such an attitude to people. To be an orator such as Plevako was, you need to be a person such as he was—not by talent, not by a gift of words, all that is secondary, but in his spiritual cast of mind, love of man, inability to indulge righteous or even justifiable hatred, in the ability to look at things not through the

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