Marie Tarnowska

Marie Tarnowska
Annie Vivanti

Annie Vivanti

Marie Tarnowska

PREFATORY NOTE

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.

TO THE AUTHOR

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.

TO THE READER

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.

    A. Vivanti Chartres.

I

Ed or, che Dio mi tolga la memoria.

    Contessa Lara.

The verdant landscape of Tuscany swung past the train that carried me southward. The looped vineyards—like slim, green dancers holding hands—fled backwards as we passed, and the rays of the March sun pursued us, beating hotly through the open windows on the dusty red velvet cushions of the carriage.

Soon the train was throbbing and panting out of Pisa, and the barefooted children of the Roman Campagna stood to gaze after us, with eyes soft and wild under their sullen hair.

Since leaving the station of Genoa I had seen nothing of the fleeting springtide landscape; my gaze and thoughts were riveted on the pages of a copy-book which lay open on my knee—a simple school copy-book with innocent blue-lined sheets originally intended to contain the carefully labored scrawls of some childish hand. A blue ornamental flourish decked the front; and under the printed title, “Program of Lessons,” the words “History,” “Geography,” “Arithmetic,” were followed by a series of blank spaces for the hours to be filled in. Alas, for the tragic pupil to whom this book belonged, in what school of horror had she learned the lesson traced on these pages by her slim, white hand—the fair patrician hand which had known the weight of many jewels, the thrill of many caresses, and was now held fast in the merciless grip of captivity.

I turned the page: before me lay a flow of pale penciled words in a sloping handwriting. At every turn the flourish of some strange seignorial name met my eye: long Russian names of prince, of lover or of murderer. On every page was the convulsion of death or the paroxysm of passion; wine and morphia, chloral and cocaine surged across the pallid sheets, like the wash of a nightmare sea.

From the midst of those turbid billows—like some ineffable modern Aphrodite—rose the pale figure of Marie Nicolaevna Tarnowska.

The first words—traced by her trembling hand in the prison at Venice—are almost childish in their simplicity.

“When I was eight years old, I fell ill with measles and almost lost my eyesight. I wore blue spectacles. I was very happy. My mother loved me very much; so did my father. So did the servants. Everybody loved me very much.”

I pause in my reading, loth to proceed. I wish I could stop here with the little girl whom every one loved and who gazed out through her blue spectacles at a rose-colored world.

Ah! Marie Nicolaevna, had your luminous eyes remained for all time hidden behind those dim blue glasses, no one to-day would raise his voice in execration of you, nor call anathema upon your fair bowed head.

But when the little Russian countess was twelve years old an oculist from Kieff ordered that her eyes should be uncovered, and “Mura,” as her parents fondly called her, looked out upon the world with those clear light eyes that were one day to penetrate the darkest depths of crime.

I continue to read without stopping. The serried pages, scrawled feverishly and hurriedly in the cells of La Giudecca in defiance of prison rules, are in thin handwriting, with names and dates harshly underlined; but here and there whole sentences are struck out, as if the writer's memory wavered, or her feelings altered as she wrote.

Immediately, on the very first page, the bold figure of young Vassili Tarnowsky confronts us: the radiant, temerarious lover, who came to woo her in her marveling adolescence.

“His voice thrilled the heart like the tones of a violoncello; in his eyes were the lights of heaven, in his smile all the promises of love. I was already seventeen years old, and wise beyond my years. But, sagacious as I thought myself, I could never believe anything that was told me against Vassili. My eyes saw nothing but his beauty. On the twelfth day of April I ran away from home with him; and we were married in a little church far away on the desolate steppes. I never thought that life could hold such joy.”

But on the very next page we come face to face with the astounding list of Vassili's perfidies: a musical enumeration of feminine names which rings the knell of his child-wife's happiness. “I never thought,” writes Marie Tarnowska simply, “that life could hold such sorrow.”

Further on there are gaps and incoherences; here and there a passing efflorescence of literary phrase, or a sudden lapse into curt narrative, as if a wave of apathy had suddenly submerged the tragic heroine and left in her place only a passive narrator of fearful events. Now and then even a note of strident humor is struck, more poignant, more painful than pathos.