Mikhail Vasilyevich Sushkov (1775–1792) was a young Russian nobleman and writer of a small body of prose and poetry, notable for his autobiographical suicide novel. He committed suicide by hanging at age 16 after writing four suicide notes, one of which was to his uncle Alexander Khrapovitsky, at that moment personal secretary of empress Catherine the Great. Empress Catherine is said to have told Khrapovitskiy: "I am sorry for his parents, who lost such a fine son. But most of all I am sorry for himself. If he had stayed alive, he soon would have outshone Voltaire". Sushkov’s suicide notes, the report on his death by the Moscow police, and reactions by contemporaries, not only document the suicide in great detail, but give a rare close-up of a phenomenon that was seen as a highly significant ‘sign of the time’.
