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,
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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
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Petersburg tales by Gogol and Dostoevsky, perhaps even a little below. But a different dynamic operates in the “Gogol line.” A larger role is played by laughter – an immense resource that the “Pushkinian” writers exploit only slightly, for brief stretches, and in a decorous, responsible manner quite foreign to the Gogol school. But also, for Gogol, a fundamentally different shape governs the fictional plot.
Public honor pursued through the dueling code requires that parties take themselves with high seriousness, stay put, and fire according to the rules. Having done so, a person “saves face.” Further explanations or public confessions are inappropriate. Gogol prefers to work in more evasive, private realms. His heroes do not stay put. They move through spaces, quickly and linearly. They don’t come home – or they don’t have identifiable homes, a possibility that is concretely realized by Dostoevsky when he houses his heroes in crowded apartments that are in effect corridors, breeding places for “accidental families.” (Tolstoy once remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters all behave as if they lived at a train station.) When Gogol’s heroes slow down, then the trouble starts, and to save themselves they must burst out. A happy ending, for Gogol, is an escape. If Pushkin is Russia’s poet of honor, then Gogol is the unmatched master of evasion and embarrassment.
Gogol and embarrassment (its linearity, lopsidedness, evasiveness)
By temperament and upbringing, Pushkin was an aristocrat, thoroughly at home in European culture. Rank, honor, and pedigree were for him second nature. Nikolai Gogol, in contrast, was a provincial, the son of a minor landowner raisedin Ukraine. Hisgraduation certificatefrompublic school conferred upon him the lowest rank, ‘collegiate registrar’ (civilian rank Fourteen). When Gogol moved to Petersburg at age nineteen, nothing in the imperial capital’s estranged, glittering, regimented social system could have struck him as natural or organic. For Gogol – a brilliant stylizer of Ukrainian folk tales, which he filled with demons, witches, and gothic villains – Petersburg proved to be marvelous creative material. His stories quickly became foundational for the Petersburg Myth.
Before entering that urban landscape, however, with its caricatures in uniform and detachable human parts, we will consider one “provincial” anecdote (Gogol’s shortest story, as it happens), which he intended for an almanac edited by Pushkin in 1835. It introduces in miniature the dynamics of a Gogolian narrative, psychological as well as spatial. This little stretch of text contains no
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fantastic or grotesque episodes of the sort we see in the Ukrainian folk tales or Petersburg stories. It passed unnoticed in the press. But Tolstoy later remarked that he was tempted to call it Gogol’s best work, and Chekhov felt that these few pages were worth 200,000 rubles, so perfectly did they concentrate Gogol’s genius. The anecdote is “The Carriage.”
A cavalry regiment enters a provincial town, largely mud and pigs. The storyteller describes the town with hyperbolic relish. Gogolian digressions, it must be said, are not elegant or elegiac, as in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; they are stuffed full of food (gorged or swilled), crude squawking sounds, the misbehavior of physical matter. A favored device of the storyteller is to fasten his eccentric roving eye on one inanimate thing (in this story, carriages) or one body part (bellies, moustaches) and stealthily, this one item becomes all on the horizon the reader sees. The general gives a banquet. Over cigars a local landowner, Chertokutsky, offers to sell his Excellency a carriage. The landowner invites the general and his officers to lunch the next day for a viewing. But then Chertokutsky stays on at the banquet, begins to play whist, “a mysterious glass full of rum punch appears before him,” he plays and drinks, drinks and plays, “recalls winning a great deal, yet there appeared to be no winnings for him to pick up . . .”.19 At 3 a.m. he stumbles home. His pretty wife doesn’t wake him in the morning, and only at noon does she hear the rumbling coaches of the general and his suite. Chertokutsky, in a panic, gives orders to say that he’s gone for the day and hides out in his carriage. The general and his men arrive. Irritated at this defaulted invitation, the general decides to take a look at the item on his way out. Nothing special about it, he says. But maybe on the inside? His officer unfastens the coverlet:
