The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the deception and brings the humiliated Grushnitsky to admit his guilt. But Grushnitsky refuses to apologize. “I despise myself and hate you!” he shouts; “Shoot!” Pechorin does so. He later averts his eyes from the bloodstained body on the rocks. Did Grushnitsky fail or pass the test that Pechorin had posed for him?

For Romantic ironists of Lermontov’s sort, a duel brought relief. Such unan-chored skepticism is not a dominant note in Pushkin, whom Lermontov worshipped. In no way could Pushkin be called na??ve – but his irony was gentler, more forgiving of others, and for all his inflammatory response to attacks on his honor, he retained until the end his faith in the visionary Poet’s ability to transcend the trivial spite of the mob with an inspired poetic word. Lermontov’s prose and worldview are more brittle and bitter. Two lyric poems, each called “The Prophet” [“Prorok”], illustrate this difference between the two Romantic-era poets.

In 1826, Pushkin wrote his “Prophet,” a biblical vision of terrible force. A six-winged seraph appears to a man “tormented by spiritual thirst” in the

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wilderness, rips out his tongue, installs the forked tongue of a wise serpent in its place, tears out his heart and replaces it with a smoldering coal. Then the voice of God instructs the benumbed man to “Rise, and see, and hear, / Be filled with My will, / and traversing land and sea, / Set fire to the hearts of men with your Word.” In 1841, the year of his death, Lermontov wrote his own “Prophet,” also in iambic tetrameter, picking up where Pushkin’s vision had left off and most likely a disillusioned response to it. Lermontov’s prophet peers into the eyes of people and sees nothing there but “malice and vice.” His neighbors and closest relatives cast stones at him; he wanders the desert like a beggar, proclaiming his truths to the silent planets and stars. Back in town, he becomes a pathetic spectacle: elders point him out to their children with a smug smile. “Look at him: . . . The stupid fellow, wanted to persuade us / That God was speaking through his lips!”

Both prophets suffer, physically and spiritually. Both are outcasts. But for Pushkin, the public is a more transitory thing. His focus remains on the sacred mission of the Word, prophetic or poetic, indifferent to the vanities of the present audience – just as, in Mozart and Salieri, Mozart’s focus remains on the mission of the “chosen few” in Music. No slander or poisoning can obstruct that reality. The prophet in Lermontov’s poem allows his jeering detractors to define the duel between them on their terms. Such abdication of authorial pride Pushkin would never allow.

In an age that admired public display, the duel was a form of self-expression and even self-realization. But the scandals that electrified the Western European public – Victor Hugo’s claim that Romanticism was “liberalism in literature,” for example, or Lord Byron’s outrageous personal behavior over several continents – were not practical options in Russia, where poets were more heavily censored and words (poetic or otherwise) were more quickly criminalized.14 Throughout his brief life, Lermontov acted (and wrote) in a manner so insolent and provocative that by 1840 he had been reduced to a line battalion, twice exiled to the Caucasus, and assigned to a punishment battalion by personal order of Tsar Nicholas I. But Lermontov did not die in battle. In the spirit of his own fictional Pechorin, he provoked a challenge from a former schoolmate and was killed on the spot at the age of twenty- seven.

Pushkin provided another variant on the duel of honor, in Chapter 4 of The Captain’s Daughter. While serving in a small frontier fort in Western Siberia, Pyotr Grinyov, hero of the tale, quarrels with Shvabrin, the villain, over an insult to the reputation of the captain’s daughter. The two men decide to duel (this is the 1770s: the weapon is the saber). On the first try they are prevented from drawing swords by the crew of comic, commonsensical characters who run the fortress, the captain’s wife (“What? Planning manslaughter in our fort?”) and a one-eyed garrison lieutenant. The captain’s wife locks up their swords

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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

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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