The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Romanticisms 111

in the kitchen pantry. Finally these two young hotheads manage to arrange a confrontation. But old Savelich, Grinyov’s stubborn serf-servant, interrupts their sword fight, appalled that his young master is “poking at others with iron skewers” (a bad habit that Savelich blames on a dissolute French tutor). Why not punch each other out with fists in the Russian way, and forget it? Grinyov is badly wounded by Shvabrin’s saber, but the tone of the entire event is comedic. Honor and the honorable testing of one’s courage quickly cease to be the issue. Rather, the duel and subsequent injury clear the air so that authentically human relations can resume (in this case, the stalled love subplot). It teaches the participants some other more important lesson about life, unrelated to the original insult and the straitjacketed ritual that must answer for it.

This type of comic, or comically framed, duel produced a rich harvest in the second half of the century. In Chapter 24 of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children (1862), the aristocratic Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, a relic from the Romantic period, announces to Bazarov, the self-proclaimed nihilist, that “I have decided to fight a duel with you” because “you are superfluous here, I can’t stand you, I despise you” (thus exposing, in one impatient gesture, the authentic motivation behind a Silvio-type duel of honor). Both men agree to dispense with the formality of a specific quarrel or insult. Bazarov wounds his opponent slightly in the leg, at which point the nihilist immediately ceases to be a duelist and becomes again a man of science and medical doctor. But this foolish, potentially dangerous pistol play between two men who simply dislike each other, which resolves nothing on the plane of honor, has highly productive consequences for the novel. The injured Pavel Petrovich, in his weakened and ecstatic condition, urges his brother Nikolai to marry the young commoner who has borne him a son. The novel’s action ends on two fertile marriages, a bucolic celebration of the habits and economy of the Russian rural manor. This frolicking of parents and children sets the tone for the “happy” patriarchal ending that so infuriated the radical critics of the 1860s, who read this novel during the emancipation of the serfs and Russia’s fraught Great Reforms.

Tolstoy devised a more complex variation on the duel of honor in his War and Peace. Unlike Turgenev’s topical Fathers and Children, published in 1862 and set three years earlier (1859), Tolstoyin the 1860s was writingahistorical novel that took place half-a-century before, during the Napoleonic Wars, when Pushkin was still a schoolboy. Tolstoy as author could look back on the institution of the duel and parody it. His fictive heroes, however, lived at a time when its hold over gentlemen of honor was absolute. In Book Two, Part I, ch. 4 of War and Peace, the insolent Dolokhov boasts that he is having an affair with Pierre’s wife. Pierre, enraged, challenges him to a duel.

The actual event is a comedy of errors. Pierre has never handled a pistol in his life. The pine forest where they meet is so full of wet, deep snow and rising mist