A rich aristocrat who often travelled, Sukhovo-Kobylin was arrested, prosecuted and tried for seven years in Russia for the murder of his French mistress Louise-Simone Dimanche, a crime of which he is nowadays generally believed to have been innocent. He only managed to achieve acquittal by means of giving enormous
bribes to court officials and by using all of his contacts in the Russian
elite. According to his own version as well as the generally accepted view today, he was targeted precisely because he had the financial capabilities to give such bribes. Based on his personal experiences, Sukhovo-Kobylin wrote a
trilogy of
satirical plays
Scenes from the Past (1854–1869) about the prevalence of bribery and other corrupt practices in the absurd
bureaucratical system of Russian Empire. First work of the trilogy, ''
Krechinsky's Wedding'' had immediate success and became one of Russia's most frequently performed plays. The trilogy in its entirety was published in 1869. Attempts to stage the last two plays,
The Trial (or
The Case) and ''Tarelkin's Death
, ran into difficulties with censorship; in particular, Tarelkin's Death
was only staged in 1899. Russian literary critic Varvara Babitskaya thinks that Tarelkin's Death'' anticipates
Franz Kafka's works and the
Theatre of the Absurd. ==English Translations==