Motives for suicide often seem inadequate to the outside observer, and many scholars have bemoaned the inadequacy of suicide notes in particular. Rather than illuminating the causes, the experience, or the drama of the act, they tend instead to be “steeped in the mundane.” Indeed, notes are often replete with awkward turns of phrase, hackneyed images, bad poetry, and detailed directions on quite mundane issues, such as the disposal of personal belongings. To seek a sublime meaning or a credible cause in the suicide note leads, almost inevitably, to disappointment. The very conventionality of notes makes them interesting for the historian, however. When approached as documents, these texts can shed light on both the culturally specific motives for suicide and the dynamics of their reception.

By the 1830s, investigatory files regularly included suicide notes. Despite their increasing frequency, however, they remained primarily a showcase for educated men who wished to stake a public claim with their voluntary deaths. They do not, therefore, illustrate the range of motives within Russian society as a whole. Most people from the lower social orders did not leave written records, and the causes of their suicides were much more likely to be categorized within the rubrics discussed in previous chapters: vice and disobedience; illness; fear of punishment; and external abuse and cruelty.