Annie Vivanti - Marie Tarnowska

On the morning of September 3rd, 1907, Count Paul Kamarowsky, a wealthy Russian nobleman, was fatally shot in his apartments on the Lido in Venice by an intimate friend, Nicolas Naumoff, son of the governor of Orel. The crime was at first believed to be political. The wounded man refused to make any statement against his assailant, whom he himself had assisted to escape from the balcony to a gondola in waiting below.

Count Kamarowsky was taken to a hospital, and for three days his recovery seemed assured; but the chief surgeon, in a sudden mental collapse—he has since died in an insane asylum—ordered the stitches to be removed from the fast-healing wounds, and Count Kamarowsky died in great agony a few hours later. His last words were a message of love to his betrothed at Kieff, a beautiful Russian woman, Countess Marie Tarnowska.

In her favor Count Kamarowsky had, shortly before his death, made a will and also insured his life for the sum of £20,000.

A number of telegrams from this lady were found addressed to a Russian lawyer, Donat Prilukoff, who had been staying at the Hotel Danieli in Venice until the day of the murder. Both this man and the Countess Tarnowska were arrested.

After a sensational trial they were found guilty of instigating the young Nicolas Naumoff to commit the murder. Countess Tarnowska was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment in the penitentiary of Trani; Prilukoff was condemned to ten years' penal servitude; while Naumoff himself was liberated in view of his having undergone two years' incarceration while awaiting his trial.

Signora:

Not only as the medical expert for the defense at the trial of the Countess Tarnowska, but as one who has made it his life-work to investigate the relation in women between criminal impulse and morbid physical condition, I cannot but feel the keenest interest in this book, in which you set forth the problem of wide human interest presented by the case of the prisoner of Trani.

When first I suggested to you that you should write this book—which (apart from its interest as dealing with a cause célèbre whose protagonists are still living and well known in European society) might bring into wider knowledge doctrines that modern physiologists and psychologists are endeavoring to diffuse—you reminded me that the medical elements of the problem could not in such a work be discussed or even clearly stated. This, of course, is true, and the significance of certain indications scattered through these pages will doubtless be lost upon those who are not familiar with such matters. Nevertheless, it was important that the book should be written, for if after her release and appropriate medical treatment the Countess Tarnowska is restored, as many of us confidently anticipate, to the complete sanity of moral well-being, your book in the light of that essential fact will have fulfilled a notable mission.

It will have helped to bring home to the general consciousness the knowledge, hitherto confined to the scientific few, that moral obliquity in women is in most cases due to pathological causes comparatively easy of diagnosis and of cure; that a woman-criminal may be morally redeemed by being physically healed; and that just as alcoholism, typhus, pyemia or other modes of toxic infection may result in delirium and irresponsibility, so certain forms of disease in women, by setting up a condition of persistent organic poisoning, may and very often do conduce to mental and moral aberration and consequent crime.

Your book, Signora, contains a truthful exposition of a group of psychic values with which physicians and psychopathists are concerned, and I believe that eventually it will promote the realization that even in the darkest regions of moral degradation it is possible for science to raise the torch of hope. Thus, though appealing for the moment to the interest of the general reader, it will ultimately constitute a significant document in the history of the evolution of pathological science.

Genoa,

January 12th, 1915.

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.”