17 January 188-

The date 17 January 188- is the day on which the merchant Therapont Emelianovich Smelkoff died in the Hotel Mauritania, an event that forms the factual and legal center of the criminal case against Katerina Maslova, Simeon Kartinkin, and Euphemia Botchkova. The indictment, the trial testimony, and the medical evidence all converge on this single date, making it the chronological pivot of the plot and the point at which Maslova's fate is sealed.

The Indictment and the Crime

The indictment, read aloud in court by the secretary, states that on 17 January 188-, in the lodging-house Mauritania, occurred the sudden death of the Second Guild merchant Therapont Emelianovich Smelkoff of Kourgan. The local police doctor initially certified that death was due to rupture of the heart, owing to the excessive use of alcoholic liquids. However, after several days had elapsed, a fellow-townsman and companion of Smelkoff, the merchant Timokhin, returned from St. Petersburg and, hearing the circumstances that accompanied the death, notified his suspicions that the death was caused by poison, given with intent to rob Smelkoff of his money. This suspicion was corroborated on inquiry, which proved that shortly before his death Smelkoff had received the sum of 3,800 roubles from the bank, but when an inventory of his property was made, only 312 roubles and 16 copecks were found. The indictment further states that the whole day and night preceding his death Smelkoff spent with Lubka (alias Katerina Maslova) at her home and in the lodging-house Mauritania, which she also visited at his request during his absence, to get some money, which she took out of his portmanteau in the presence of the servants Euphemia Botchkova and Simeon Kartinkin, with a key given her by Smelkoff. In the portmanteau opened by Maslova, Botchkova and Kartinkin saw packets of 100-rouble bank-notes. On Smelkoff's return to the lodging-house together with Lubka, the latter, in accordance with Kartinkin's advice, gave Smelkoff some white powder given to her by Kartinkin, dissolved in brandy. The next morning, Lubka sold to her mistress, the witness Carolina Albertovna Kitaeva, a brothel-keeper, a diamond ring given to her, as she alleged, by Smelkoff. The housemaid of the lodging-house, Euphemia Botchkova, placed to her account in the local Commercial Bank 1,800 roubles. The postmortem examination of the body and the chemical analysis of his intestines proved beyond doubt the presence of poison in the organism, so that there is reason to believe that Smelkoff's death was caused by poisoning.

The Trial and the Verdict

During the trial, the president of the court, turning to the prisoners, repeated the accusation: "You are accused of having on the 17th January, 188-, together with Euphemia Botchkova and Katerina Maslova, stolen money from a portmanteau belonging to the merchant Smelkoff, and then, having procured some arsenic, persuaded Katerina Maslova to give it to the merchant Smelkoff in a glass of brandy, which was the cause of Smelkoff's death." The date is thus the legal anchor of the charge. The medical report, read at length in court, describes the external and internal examination of Smelkoff's body, noting that the skin was easily detachable from the bones of the skull, that there were discolored spots on the membrane of the brain, and that the changes observed in the stomach, and to a lesser degree in the bowels and kidneys, gave great probability to the conclusion that Smelkoff's death was caused by poison which had entered his stomach mixed with alcohol. The reading of this report took a full hour, and the public prosecutor insisted on having the report of the examination of the internal organs read as well, which further prolonged the proceedings. The jury's verdict, delivered on 28 April, found Maslova guilty of the poisoning, and she was sentenced to four years' penal servitude in Siberia, a sentence that was later commuted to exile to the less distant districts of Siberia by the Emperor's decree.

The Date as a Symbol of Injustice

The date 17 January 188- is not merely a chronological marker; it is the point at which the legal machinery of the state, with its arbitrary procedures and class biases, first seizes Maslova's life. The events of that day—the drinking, the theft, the poisoning—are reconstructed through the conflicting testimonies of the accused and the witnesses, and the truth of what actually happened remains obscured by the formalities of the trial. The date thus stands for the moment when a woman's fate is decided not by justice but by the impersonal, often cruel, operations of the law. It is the date that Nekhludoff, sitting on the jury, cannot escape, and it is the date that haunts him as he begins his moral awakening, realizing that he, too, is complicit in the chain of events that led to that day.