A Diary of a Writer (1876-1877)

In May of 1876, twenty-year-old Ekaterina Kornilova pushed her six-year-old step-daughter out a fourth story window.  Kornilova and her husband had married for love but had begun fighting.  During their fights, he repeatedly told Kornilova that she was falling short of the example of his first wife (the six-year-old’s mother).  

Three days before the crime, Kornilova went to a name-day party at her friend’s house.  Her husband had to work, and so he stayed back.  The party went late, and since it was a long way from her house, the hosts persuaded her to spend the night there.  This was the husband’s first night away from his wife, and he got angry.  The next day, he went to the friend’s house and beat Kornilova in front of everybody.  They went home and didn’t speak to each other or eat with each other for two days.  

On the night of the second day, Kornilova decided to kill her step-daughter, whom she’d come to hate because of her husband.  The next morning, while the husband was at work, Kornilova opened the window, moved all the flowerpots to one side, and told the girl to climb onto the sill and look down through the open window.  Once the girl had done so, Kornilova picked up her legs and thrust her out.  Later, when told that the girl had been discovered miraculously unharmed, Kornilova indifferently replied, “She’s got the lives of a cat.”

When Dostoevsky first heard of this attempted murder, he was struck by its bizarreness and had a hunch that there was more to the story, and so he attended Kornilova’s trial.  She was found to be acting consciously, and she was sentenced to two years and eight months of hard labor in Siberia.  

Dostoevsky disagreed with this sentence, and, in his monthly journal, A Diary of a Writer, publicly called for a reconsideration of the case.  Something, he claimed, didn’t add up.  Firstly, before Kornilova pushed the girl out of the window, she washed her and fed her breakfast.  Why would she do this?  Secondly, as soon as Kornilova had carried out her crime, she immediately went to the police station and calmly told them everything.  This fact was most baffling of all.

There was another fact that Dostoevsky found illuminating: Kornilova was pregnant.  In rare cases, women can experience strange, temporary, psychological effects during pregnancy.  Dostoevsky had known one woman who took to compulsive theft during her pregnancy, though she was wealthy and had no need of the items she stole.  The more Dostoevsky thought about Kornilova’s situation, the more he was convinced that she had been acting under temporary derangement.

Dostoevsky also predicted in the Diary that Kornilova and her husband would quickly reconcile.  Even the little girl and the stepmother were probably ready to love each other.

Dostoevsky was sure that no one would benefit from sending this woman to hard labor in Siberia.  Greatly concerned for her and her newborn baby (who would go with her), he visited her in jail to help her appeal her case.  As Dostoevsky had himself done hard labor in Siberia, he also gave her advice about how best to survive in that environment.  His hopes weren’t high; Kornilova was young and pretty, and Siberia was full of men eager to entice such women into prostitution.  Making even one move in this direction could ruin a woman until the day she died; Siberian villagers had a reputation for being merciless toward “fallen women.”  Even the baby girl would be forced to follow her mother’s career.

On these visits, Dostoevsky discovered that his predictions had been correct.  Husband and wife had forgiven each other, and both were grieved by their upcoming separation.

Fortunately, the Diary had influential readers who found Dostoevsky’s insight persuasive and helped appeal the case.  Kornilova was granted a second trial.

This trial had two factors that the first hadn’t: a lineup of renowned psychiatrists, and the witness testimony of the wardress of Kornilova’s jail.  The wardress had an interesting story to tell.  When Kornilova had first come to jail, she was “sullen, rude, and uncommunicative,” but after a few weeks, her personality suddenly and radically shifted: “her disposition became stable, calm, kind, and serene.”  This testimony, combined with expert confirmation, swayed the jury; Kornilova was acquitted.  The president of the court declared that this reversal was largely due to Dostoevsky’s ideas published in Diary of a Writer.

Not everyone was happy about Kornilova’s sudden freedom.  A journalist who identified himself as an “Observer” was furious and wrote an article condemning both the court’s decision and Dostoevsky’s involvement.  This verdict, claimed the Observer, exonerated child abuse and set a bad precedent by letting criminals loose on the basis of vague psychological speculation.

In his Diary, Dostoevsky defended his stance by addressing the Observer’s article.  He pointed out that his Diary had often defended children in abuse cases, and that he believed that over-acquittal of perpetrators would lead to greater harm to victims and that to reduce a perpetrator’s guilt to their circumstances was to rob them of their dignity by disallowing them choices.  But, he said, injustice frequently occurs when we get so wrapped up in general tendencies that we pick a side before we’ve heard the minutia of a case.  Justice must live by paying attention to the particulars of each case, not by reducing judgement to sweeping generalities.  

One can’t read the account of the Kornilova case without being astounded by the almost prescient psychological insight of Dostoevsky.  He could see the truth when no one else could.  How?  By what process was he able to decipher such a complex matter?  It can’t be denied that Dostoevsky seems naturally gifted in this area, but I don’t think that is a full answer.

In my opinion, Dostoevsky’s psychological insight derives largely from his training as a novelist.  To spend the bulk of your time writing fiction is to be constantly disciplining your imagination to work through the ever-present question: “What would this person do in this situation?”  Though this disciplined imagination, the fiction writer can actually make discoveries about human psychology.  Kornilova’s case is a powerful example of the importance of the fictional imagination in our quest to understand ourselves and to treat each other well.