4 - Punishing the body, cleansing the conscience

Summary

Kurochkina is hereby sentenced to five lashes, to be carried out at the police precinct by one of its lower subordinates, and then, for the cleansing of the conscience, to church penance, as determined by the spiritual authority.

Opinion of the Nizhnii Novgorod District Court in the case of Agrafena Kurochkina, accused of fornication and attempting to hang herself, 1829–30

It all began, according to Agrafena Kurochkina, the daughter of a soldier living in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, when the soldier Stepan Fedotov beat her up in a fit of jealousy. On that fateful day in November 1829, he hit her in the head, pulled her across the floor by her hair and kicked her; later that same day, he hit her so hard that she lost consciousness. Consequently, she could not remember going into the courtyard much less that she “supposedly wanted to hang herself” there. In claiming to have acted, literally, “without memory” (bespamiatstvo), Kurochkina was pleading innocent to the charge of attempting suicide by reason of what might be called temporary insanity. We cannot know whether she was telling the truth, or, equally interesting, whether she understood the legal importance of intention in the prosecution of a felony, but the latter is a plausible explanation for the language in the court protocol. Steadfastly denying the charges, Kurochkina herself apparently used the term bespamiatstvo. Unfortunately for Kurochkina, the police did not believe her story.