The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

112 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

that bodies – even Pierre’s immensely fat, bulky body – can scarcely be seen. Pierre’s second dutifully attempts to reconcile the opponents, but even though Pierre agrees it was all “desperately stupid” he can’t be roused to stop it, asks his second “what to shoot at,” and then waves him away. Staggering toward the barrier, the nearsighted Pierre pulls the trigger, seriously wounds Dolokhov, and then, sobbing in remorse, exposes his broad chest to his opponent’s bullet. Dolokhov fires and misses. As in Turgenev, the comic replay of a death-dealing ritual enables a breakthrough to otherwise unavailable wisdoms.

Up to this point, Dolokhov has been a scoundrel, cardsharp, and partner in mischief to the despicable Anatol Kuragin. Returning from the duel and perhaps dying, he confides to his friend Nikolai Rostov that everything is folly and lies except his “adored, angelic mother,” who will not survive the news of his wound. Rostov – and the reader – realize that what was most important to this man had been invisible on the surface of his life, unsuspected throughout all these pages of the novel, until a bullet broke down his defenses. “To his utter astonishment, he [Rostov] found out that the rough, tough Dolokhov,Dolokhovtheswaggeringbully,livedinMoscowwithhisoldmother and a hunchback sister. He was a loving son and brother.”15 Such moments of biographical revelation, triggered by the unpredictable outcome of a life-and-death event like the duel of honor, induce humility in Tolstoy’s readers. Central to Tolstoy’s Realisticmessage (inspired partially by theproseofPushkin, the lesson of the Prodigal Son woodcuts on the stationmaster’s wall) is that life never submits wholly to any single writing-up of it, and pockets of private experience, revealed by chance, can remake the perceived world. Episodes like this glimpse of Dolokhov’s family, randomly made available to the heroes but carefully planned by the author, soften the effect of Tolstoy’s overwhelming, panoptic narrative authority.16

Our final variant on Pushkin-era duels is Chekhov’s 1891 novella, The Duel. Traces of the entire nineteenth century can be found in it. Turgenev’s relatively civil dueling scene in Fathers and Children, between a late-Romantic-era aristocrat and a scientist-nihilist, has now mutated into something far less decorous. Layevsky, the vacillating, indolent “superfluous man,” having fled with another man’s wife to a coastal town on the Black Sea, is challenged to a duel by von Koren, marine zoologist and social Darwinist. They understand and despise each other. Layevsky has been borrowing money to escape from his mistress, who now bores and embarrasses him, and return to Petersburg; von Koren, after careful analysis of this useless parasitic type, is not averse to wiping him out. On an absurd pretext that flares up over dinner, they agree to fight. “Gentlemen, who remembers how it goes in Lermontov?” von Koren asks, since no one present has ever attended a duel before. “And in Turgenev,