1 AUTHOR TYPESCRIPT. Only the published version of this essay may be quoted: D. L. Dusenbury, “‘A World like a Russian Novel’: The Trials of Socrates and Jesus.” TLS. The Times Literary Supplement (10 April 2020), 21. “A World like a Russian Novel” The Trials of Socrates and Jesus TLS. The Times Literary Supplement (10 April 2020), 21 D. L. Dusenbury Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously signed his last letters “The Antichrist” (to Cosima Wagner) and “The Crucified” (to Cardinal Rampolla, the Vatican’s Secretary of State). It is hard to isolate the cause of Nietzsche’s final derangement, but his mind definitively cracked in December 1888. By January 1889, he had plunged into a catatonic state from which he never reemerged. A decade before he began to sign letters “The Crucified”, Nietzsche wrote a paragraph of Human, All Too Human titled “Judicial Murders” (Justizmorde). In this paragraph he notes a weird resemblance in what he calls “the two greatest judicial murders in world history”, by which he means the deaths of Socrates and Jesus. “In both cases”, he says, “the victim wanted to die”. And in both cases, the victim bent “the hand of human injustice to thrust the sword into his own