The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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

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