Russian literature. A short introduction

ignored the voice of conscience too long). Equally, there is no doubt that the duel between Evgeny Onegin and Lensky is to be understood as a form of homicide licensed by civilization, though this point is conveyed indirectly, through a comically embittered disquisition upon the joys of revenge:

It is pleasant to enrage an obtuse enemy

With an impudent epigram [ . . . ]

Pleasanter if he, my friends,

Bawls out in stupid rage: ‘That’s me!’

Still pleasanter to prepare in silence

An honourable grave for him,

And to shoot silently at his pale forehead

From a well-bred distance;

But sending him to the land of his fathers

Is unlikely to be a pleasant experience.

It would be absurd to interpret the final proposition here as a stylistic mannerism, introduced merely in order to puncture the overblown rhetoric of revenge with plain speaking. But wry humour pushes just out of reach an obvious truth – that killing even one’s enemies is not nice.

Delicate irony of this kind, though, rests on a fragile pyramid of assumptions about the way that readers are likely to react. As Yury Lotman has pointed out, in Pushkin’s generation the duel was well on its way to being regarded as ‘ritual murder’ (and less melodramatically, as a form of posturing that was fatuous in adult males, an interpretation that hovers at the fringes of Pechorin’s duel with his charlatan-double Grushnitsky in Lermontov’s The Hero of Our Time (1841), and came fully into its own in Chekhov’s representations of duelling half a century later). In a society where the duel was universally accepted as the central means of settling affairs of honour, an assault upon the practice of duelling as immoral would have needed to be expressed more