In the morning, Naumov called at the Venetian residence of Count Komarowski. The master of the house received him; without a word, his former friend fired four revolver shots into his abdomen. Komarowski asked him why, and died four days later. Naumov admitted to the shooting. Yet the question that was to occupy the Venetian jurors for weeks was not merely whose hand had held the weapon. Who had written the telegram, impelled the young Russian toward murder, or subsequently sought to shift onto another the origin of the design? And how far may one will be steered by that of another? The account of this trial, published in 1911 by Hugo Friedländer, is a retrospective source, rich in courtroom detail yet steeped in judgment and conjecture. One must follow the depositions therein without mistaking the author’s character sketches for the truth.
On September 3, 1907, according to Friedländer, Naumov arrived in Venice. The following day, he shot the count. The chronicle records four bullets striking the abdomen. Komarowski did not die instantly: he received medical care, then succumbed four days later. Naumov had fled toward Verona, where he was arrested and admitted having fired the shots. His confession established the physical act; it did not resolve the question of complicity, nor that of intent. Friedländer frames the affair within a circle of debts, matrimonial expectations, and pecuniary interests, but these motives are conveyed through the conflicting accounts of the accused and the interpretations of their adversaries.
The trial opened in Venice on March 4, 1910, and lasted for nearly three months. Four persons stood in the dock: Naumov, Countess Mura Tarnowska, Prilukov, and Elise Perier. The public had anticipated a drama bordering on romance; the courtroom was instead to produce incompatible narratives, delivered by men and a woman whose liberty hung in the balance, while the shadow of the victim could answer neither the accusations leveled against him nor the designs imputed to those around him.
Naumov did not deny the shooting, but declared that he had not acted alone in his mind. He spoke of influence, of promises, of a telegram bearing Komarowski’s name that had spurred him to action. Prilukov, for his part, attributed the idea of the murder to Tarnowska and represented the telegram as one of the instruments of that undertaking. Tarnowska rejected this construction and offered her own chronology: she stated that Komarowski had introduced Naumov to her in Orel, and went on to describe the relationship that had formed between them. Yet her testimony, as reported by Friedländer, did not clear her of all participation: she acknowledged having asked Prilukov by telegram to do what was necessary to urge Naumov to act, and later giving him precise instructions in Moscow on how to accomplish the murder. She maintained that these acts followed the will of Prilukov, to whom she ascribed the original conception, and that she had believed until the very last moment that Naumov would not carry it out. The accounts remained in direct opposition; the question of the first instigator could not be conflated with that of the acts each admitted to.
It is therefore impossible to take any of these narratives as unreserved truth. Naumov had fired the shots and had an interest in diminishing his responsibility; Prilukov and Tarnowska each had an interest in casting upon the other the origin of the plot. Letters, telegrams, and meetings were debated as so many traces to be interpreted, but Friedländer’s report does not allow one to dissolve these contradictions by adopting a convenient psychology. What can be affirmed is far more limited and, for that very reason, more solid: the shooter admitted his act; the other two defendants accused each other of having conceived or directed the enterprise; the jury would have to distinguish between participation, premeditation, and degree of responsibility.
To these matters was added another, rarely incidental in a murder trial: had the wounded man’s death resulted solely from the gunshot wounds, or had his medical treatment contributed to the fatal end? The physicians offered conflicting opinions regarding the operation, the opening of the suture, and the management of peritonitis. Some held that surgical intervention had worsened the patient’s condition; others maintained that the abdominal wounds were mortal and that the surgeons’ conduct could not be deemed the determining cause. The narrative presents the words of experts who clashed vigorously, but it does not convert this controversy into an independent medical conclusion. The jurors answered affirmatively to a question regarding the contribution of clinical treatment to the death; this does not mean the court found any physician guilty of homicide.
The discussion of Tarnowska’s responsibility was likewise steeped in the notions of the day. Alienists spoke of suggestion, hysteria, and diminished faculties; others contested these concepts or invested them with a different meaning. Friedländer, who took relish in sketching stark psychological portraits, at times ventured far beyond what the testimony established. His observations on character, women, and the “will” cannot stand in lieu of a diagnosis. Nevertheless, the question of partial alienation had a concrete effect upon the verdict: the jury recognized diminished responsibility for both Tarnowska and Naumov, while finding them guilty of the acts charged against them. It did not hold them to be entirely unaccountable.
The trial thus took the form of a contest over legal definitions. For Naumov, the material act was admitted; the jurors had to weigh the murder and his degree of responsibility. For Tarnowska, participation in premeditated murder was upheld, though with the aforementioned diminution of responsibility. For Prilukov, the jury found premeditated participation without granting him that mitigating factor. The questions concerning Perier, by contrast, received negative answers: she was acquitted. She must not be confused with the other three, nor should one infer from her presence in their circle an awareness of the design that the verdict did not establish.
The jury also found that the clinical treatment had contributed to the count’s death—a point that recalls how far the trial exceeded a mere clash between the versions of Naumov, Tarnowska, and Prilukov. It turned equally upon causality: an injury, treatment, deterioration, and death formed a sequence that the medical experts did not describe with a single voice. This answer detracted nothing from the fact that Naumov had fired the shots, yet it precluded recounting the outcome as though medical science had agreed upon an unequivocal mechanism.
The printed reports do not agree precisely on the sentences imposed. In the chapter published in 1911, Friedländer writes that Naumov was sentenced to three years and six months of imprisonment, Tarnowska to eight years and six months, and Prilukov to ten years; Perier was acquitted. An article in The Spectator published on May 28, 1910, indicates instead three years and one month for Naumov, eight years and four months for Tarnowska, and ten years for Prilukov. Other contemporary dispatches round the first two sentences to whole numbers. These variations must not be artificially harmonized: the exact duration remains a discrepancy between publications, whereas the acquittal of Perier and the ten-year sentence for Prilukov are consistent across the sources consulted.
This discrepancy is not a minor detail to be corrected at will. It serves as a reminder that a trial account, even one published shortly after the hearings, transmits transcription errors, approximations, or condensations. Friedländer is valuable for the sequence of interrogations, expert testimonies, and pleadings; he does not constitute, by himself, an official record of the judgment. Likewise, the finding of diminished responsibility does not settle the question of intimate influence as the newspapers imagined it. It establishes a judicial answer to specific questions put to the jurors, not an exhaustive knowledge of the minds of those involved.
Thus the proceedings came to a close, without the trial having silenced every question it had raised. Naumov had fired and admitted doing so; the jurors convicted him. Tarnowska and Prilukov were also convicted, under distinct legal qualifications, while Perier walked free. Yet the origin of the design remained disputed in the very words of the accused, and the physicians had not spoken with one voice regarding the death. In this case, the archive yields no single key to unlock all consciences at once: it preserves rather the conflict between self-serving testimonies, opposing expert opinions, and a judicial decree that set certain boundaries around them.