Sukhovo-Kobylin affair
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The Sukhovo-Kobylin affair was the case surrounding the murder on November 7, 1850, of Louise Simon-Dimanche, a French milliner living in Moscow, in which Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin, a playwright and Simon-Dimanche's presumed lover, was one of the suspects. The investigation lasted from 1850 to 1857, and Sukhovo-Kobylin was arrested twice. During his imprisonment he completed work on his first play, Krechinsky's Wedding. Among the other suspects were Simon-Dimanche's servants, as well as Nadezhda Naryshkina, a lady from Moscow high society who left Russia after her interrogation and went to France.
The investigators included the Moscow chief of police Ivan Luzhin, the Moscow Governor-General Arseny Zakrevsky, the Minister of Justice Viktor Panin, and members of the Governing Senate and State Council. Eventually both Sukhovo-Kobylin and Simon-Dimanche's servants were acquitted. The verdict passed by the State Council never identified the murderer. The process attracted a great deal of public attention and left an imprint on the playwright's work.
Louise Simon-Dimanche, who had immigrated to Russia from France in 1842, lived in a five-room apartment in Count Gudovich's house on the corner of Tverskaya Street (the building was later moved to Bryusov pereulok, 21[1]), which was rented for her by Sukhovo-Kobylin.[2] In the evening of November 7, 1850, she went out into the street and did not return home. The next morning, when Sukhovo-Kobylin did not find her in the apartment, he organized a private search, by sending a courier to a lady who knew Louise and visiting friends who might have known her whereabouts. The servants maintained that their master "had never before been so alarmed about the absence of Dimanche". In the afternoon of November 9, Sukhovo-Kobylin went to a meeting of the Merchants' Assembly, where he found the Moscow chief of police Ivan Luzhin and informed him of his concern about Simon-Demanche's fate. Luzhin gave an order to question cab drivers, but none of them could remember a passenger "in a fur coat and hat".[3]
On the same day, the Cossack Andrei Petryakov discovered the body of a woman about thirty-five years old lying in a snowdrift near the Vagankovo Cemetery.[4] According to the police report, the deceased was of medium height and was wearing a green checkered dress, white silk stockings and black velvet half-boots, as well as gold and diamond earrings on her ears and rings on her hands. Her braided brown hair was fastened with a "tortoiseshell comb missing a tooth". In the victim's pocket there was a set of "internal keys of various sizes". Equally detailed was the report of Dr. Tikhomirov, who established during his examination that there was "a transverse wound with ragged edges about three vershoks [13 cm] long, around the throat, on the front of the neck".[5] Near the body were the tracks of a sledge; judging by the horses' footprints, the carriage first turned away from the road and then headed towards Moscow.[6]
Soon the police chief Luzhin received a document stating that Sukhovo-Kobylin's serfs, Galaktion Kozmin and Ignat Makarov, had identified the dead woman as the "foreigner Louise Ivanovna, who lived in Gudovich's house".[7] Announcing an investigation into the murder of Simon-Dimanche, Luzhin advised the members of the commission to look into the behavior of the retired titular councillor Sukhovo-Kobylin, who in a private conversation had given correct directions for the searches for the missing woman and had "repeatedly expressed fears that she had been killed".[8]
