The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

108 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

didactic social comedy of Fonvizin or Knyazhnin from the 1770s–80s, although girl and boy get together in those scenarios too. Eighteenth-century comedy leaves its trace throughout the Belkin Tales (and throughout Pushkin’s prose) in different, more decorative ways – in the secondary characters, for example, who are often quite “unRussian”: the sassy maid as go-between for her mistress (a French soubrette), the ignorant or immoral provincial tutor. But there are no Sofyas or Milons in the leading roles. In Pushkin, positive characters exercise real initiative. They make choices and take risks. They must, of course, have an inborn sense of honor and loyalty, but they act in their own interests and according to their own na¨ıve appetites. Only then will fate be on their side. Plots are rounded and people come home.

As we shall see, Gogolian time-space has a different shape altogether. Although also comic, it cannot support anything like a wholesome appetite or a circular, homecoming plot. Honor is not relevant to it, although rules most definitely are. Gogol is Russia’s first Kafka, her supreme chronicler of bureaucracies and the insecurities of social life as it registers on the shy and the neurotic.Heis the patron saintof heroes who linearly bolt outofa narrative and disappear. Before we move to Gogol’s realm of Russian Romanticism, however, a few words are in order on the legacy of the first Belkin Tale, “The Shot.” It links Pushkin’s troubled consideration of the duel of honor in Eugene Onegin – the hero’s failure to prevent his best friend’s death – with a long Russian literary tradition of botched, parodied, or “estranged” duels. In each, the duel ends up testing some other sort of honorableness, some value deeper than a passing insult or a set of societal codes.

Duels

As love is displaced and misses its mark in Eugene Onegin, so are bullets displaced and (mercifully) go astray in “The Shot.” The narrative structure of this tiny story is so ingeniously layered and jointed that we forgive its banal, fantastical plot. The gothic hero Silvio, insulted at a ball, calls out his rival, a handsome and wealthy count. Obsessively jealous and infuriated by his opponent’s casu-alness at the duel, Silvio postpones his shot; the count graciously allows him to redeem it at any time. For several years Silvio plots his vengeance, awaiting a chance to test the courage of his opponent when the latter has something he fears to lose. A re-run of the duel finally occurs, in front of the count’s new wife. We slowly realize that Silvio can never satisfy his honor because the issue is not an isolated insult but the count’s whole personality, a blend of courage, self-respect, noble rank, and moral superiority. Such people are beyond testing. We discern a link between this Belkin Tale – a “little comedy,” since no one is