The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Romanticisms 113

doesn’t Bazarov have a duel with someone or other?”17 Layevsky shoots into the air, but von Koren aims directly at his opponent’s forehead. Suddenly a comic episode erupts, recalling the duel-side antics of the serf Savelich in Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter. The local deacon, a man of irrepressible good humor for whom everything is hilarious, has been spying in the bushes. Unexpectedly, desperately, he shouts out. At that very moment, von Koren fires and misses. “But he was going to kill him!” says the deacon, radiant and shamefaced after the smoke has cleared. By the end of the tale, Layevsky has married his mistress and settled down to shabby real life, working as a clerk to pay off his debts. Von Koren is the one who leaves town, and the deacon congratulates him for “overcoming mankind’s most powerful enemy – pride.” The age of the charismatic duel is over.

Meaningful dueling scenarios that “remember one another” can be traced in a straight line from Eugene Onegin and “The Shot” through Lermontov to Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. The roll call is significant. These great writers belong to the “Pushkin line” of Russian literature, where such issues as honor (variously defined), clarity, openness, civic decency, and public quests for a positive identity are central. The other great tradition to grow out of Russian Romanticism, begun by Nikolai Gogol and perfected by Dostoevsky, did not find the duel especially useful as a defense of personal dignity or private space. In Gogol, protagonists are too insignificant, non-noble, erratic, or caricatured to resort to dueling. Dostoevsky is more complex.18 His heroes talk constantly of honor and insult. They worry obsessively about how to avenge bumps on the street or slaps in the face. References to duels are everywhere – but most of them fail or remain unrealized fantasies. Either the would-be challenger doesn’t know the proper formula for calling a party out, or the other party refuses to accept the challenge. The Underground Man is too “hyper-conscious” to identify precisely the insult received (only “men of action” are obtuse enough to strike back vigorously when struck). Or worst of all, the aggrieved party might dimly realize that what insults him most profoundly and unanswerably is part of his own self, which must then be “called out” by other means (this is the task explored by Dostoevsky in his 1846 novella The Double). In The Brothers Karamazov, the threshold duel that turned Zosima from frivolous military officer toward a life of the spirit is buried deep inside the novel, in a luminous reminiscence recorded by Alyosha to glorify his mentor’s teaching. This route to self-awareness and conversion is not available as an option to most Dostoevskian heroes.

The vagary of rank was not in itself an obstacle to dueling. Pushkin, at civilian rank Nine (titular councilor), was of the same low status as the poor clerks in