Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin's literary legacy consists of a single trilogy of plays that ranks along with the satires of Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin, Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol, and Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboedov as one of the consummate masterpieces of this genre in Russian literature. While Sukhovo-Kobylin considered philosophy his primary vocation, his battles with the censors for the publication and staging of his three plays, Svad'ba Krechinskogo (1856; translated as Krechinsky's Wedding, 1961), Delo (The Case, 1861), and Smert' Tarelkina (Tarelkin's Death), first published as Raspliuevskie veselye dni (Raspliuev's Merry Days) in Kartiny proshedshego (Pictures of the Past, 1869), most effectively stifled his further literary endeavors. The genesis of the plays during the period when he was under investigation for the murder of his mistress, the French seamstress Louise Simone-Dimanche, gave Sukhovo-Kobylin a painfully intimate acquaintance with the Russian legal system, the corrupt bureaucracy that enforced it, and the exquisitely tortuous system of bribery and extortion...