"Therefore," I said, somewhat bewildered, "we would have to eat again from the Tree of Knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?""Quite right," he answered. "And that's the last chapter in the history of the world."Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theatre"On the morning of 11 May 1876, a young seamstress pushed her stepdaughter out the window of their Petersburg apartment. The apparent reason for this attempted infanticide (miraculously, the child survived her four-story plunge) was Ekaterina Kornilova's anger at her husband and jealousy of his deceased first wife. The case would seem undistinguished in its sordidness were it not for Fedor Dostoevskii's adoption of the affair as a cause celebre. Although he originally attacked Kornilova's defenders, Dostoevskii later defended her as well when he learned that Kornilova had been pregnant at the time of the attempted murder.