This book is not written to plead Marie Tarnowska's cause. The strange
Russian woman whose hand slew no man, but whose beauty drove those who
loved her to commit murder for her sake, will soon have ended her eight
years' captivity and will come forth into the world once more.
I have not sought in any way to minimize her guilt, or attenuate her
responsibility for the sin and death that followed in her train. Though
she must be held blameless for the boy Peter Tarnowsky's tragic fate and
even for Dr. Stahl's suicide, yet Bozevsky's death, Naumoff's downfall
and the murder of Count Kamarowsky will forever be laid at her door.
I have tried to convey to the cool, sober mind of the Anglo-Saxon
reader--to whom much of this amazing story of passion and crime may
appear almost incredible--that sequence of tragic events which brought
Marie Nicolaevna to her ruin.
Weighted by a heritage of disease (her mother was a neurasthenic invalid
and two of her aunts are even now confined in an insane asylum in
Russia), she was married when still on the threshold of girlhood and
swept into the maëlstrom of a wild life--a frenzied, almost hallucinated,
existence such as is led by a certain section of the Russian
aristocracy, whom self-indulgence drives to depths of degeneracy hardly
to be realized by the outside world.
With the birth of her child, Tania, Marie Tarnowska's fragile health
broke down completely, and the few years preceding the tragedy which led
to her arrest were spent traveling through Europe in a feverish quest of
health or at least of oblivion of her sufferings. According to such
medical authorities as Redlich, Fenomenof, Rhein, Bossi, and many other
eminent gynecologists and alienists, she is, and has been for some years
past, suffering from a slow form of blood poisoning which affects the
nervous centers and the brain, and which--as I myself had a painful
opportunity of witnessing when I saw her in prison--causes periodic
cataleptic seizures that imperil her life.
It was by one of her medical advisers, Professor Luigi Bossi, of the
University of Genoa, that the idea of this book was first given to me.
"I was called as an expert for the defense at the Venice trial," said
the Professor, "and I was grieved and indignant at the heavy sentence
inflicted upon this unhappy woman. Marie Tarnowska is not delinquent,
but diseased; not a criminal, but an invalid; and her case, like that of
many other female transgressors, is one for the surgeon's skill and the
physician's compassionate care, not for the ruthless hand of the law.
Indeed," the illustrious Professor continued, "it is becoming more and
more a recognized fact that many cases of criminality in woman have a
physical, not a moral origin. By her very mission--maternity--woman is
consecrated to pain; and whereas by nature she is a creature of
gentleness and goodness, the effect of physical suffering, of ailments
often unconfessed--nay, often unrealized by herself--is to transform her
into a virago, a hypochondriac, or a criminal. Then our duty is to cure
her, not to punish her.
"It may be merely a question," he explained, "of a slight surgical
intervention; sometimes even brief medical treatment is sufficient to
save a woman's life and reason. The wider knowledge of this simple
scientific fact in the social life of our time would redeem and
rehabilitate thousands of unfortunate women who people the prisons and
the madhouses of the world.
"As for the unhappy Countess Tarnowska," added Professor Bossi, "the
Venetian tribunal refused to regard her as a suffering human being, but
flung her out of society like some venomous reptile. Read these notes
that she wrote in prison," he said, placing in my hand a book of almost
illegible memoranda. "If they touch your heart, then do a deed of
justice and generosity. Go to the penitentiary of Trani, see the
prisoner yourself, and give her story to the world. So will you perform
an act of humanity and beneficence by helping to diffuse a scientific
truth in favor, not of this one woman alone, but of all women."
After glancing through the strange human document he had given me I
decided to do what he asked; for, indeed, from those poor, incoherent
pages there seemed to rise the eternal cry of suffering womanhood--the
anguished cry of those that perpetuate the gift of life--which no
sister-soul can hear unmoved.
Thus it was that my mind was first directed to the theme of this book
and that I undertook the task--fraught with almost insuperable
difficulties--of breaking down official prohibitions and reaching the
Russian captive in her distant Italian prison.
And now that I have been brought face to face with that strange and
mournful figure, now that I have heard her story from her own pale lips,
I am moved by the puissant impulse of art, which takes no heed of
learned theory or ethical code, to narrate in these pages the profound
impression made upon me by that tragic personality, by the story of that
broken life.
I have endeavored to do so with faithfulness, exaggerating nothing,
coloring nothing, extenuating nothing. It will be for the pontiffs of
science and morals to achieve the more complex task of drawing
conclusions and establishing theories that may one day diminish
injustice and suffering in the world.