The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Birth, service rank, and social status came together for Pushkin in the concept of honnete homme, a man of honor. This image (or ego ideal) hovers constantly over Pushkin’s heroes. It sits at the center of his historical novel on Pugachov’s rebellion, The Captains Daughter (1836), which is organized entirely around the nurturing, testing, and defining of honorable behavior. In the final scenes of Boris Godunov (1825), Pyotr Basmanov, the tsar’s brilliant military commander and a man of non-princely birth, defects to the Pretender. He is urged to do so by Gavrila Pushkin, ancestor of the poet and military aide to the invading False Dmitry. Basmanov openly confesses that he feels trapped in the traditional Muscovite system, where a princely pedigree guaranteed incompetents a

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promotion while heroes like himself were passed over. Precisely such corrupting “advancement by genealogy alone” was eliminated, one century later, by Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks.

One’s official title was tied to self-respect on more mundane planes. How promptly need one pay gambling debts – or any debts at all – to a person of lower rank? Is it a fresh insult to a dueling opponent to bring, as one’s official second, a man of low birth or of lesser (or no) rank? Quite possibly the tragic subplot of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1823–31) turns precisely on such details.5 Onegin finds himself challenged to a duel by his best friend Lensky over a trivial indiscretion committed at a provincial name-day party. Onegin feels badly about the flare-up and seeks an honorable way out, in a stratagem designed to save Lensky’s honor as well as his life. Lensky had chosen as his second one Zaretsky, a local landowner known to be a “pedant in duels” (Six, XXVI: 8). In a deliberately provocative move, Onegin brings along as his second not a gentleman (as the dueling code required) but his own valet, one Monsieur Guillot. Zaretsky should have canceled the event on a technicality. But for some reason Zaretsky does not enforce strict rules on this particular day. He is insulted but he only bites his lip. So the duel moves mechanically forward, honor is preserved, Onegin fires, a man is dead.

The duel of honor, initially devised to confirm aristocratic courtiers as a military-social class, was codified in the Italian Renaissance as a secular (and usually illegal) ritual response to perceived insults in which “extreme violence was meted out with extreme politeness.”6 As an institution it came late to Russian culture, which did not experience an Age of Chivalry and continued to preferfistfights toformalduelsup until theend of the eighteenth century.7 Once arrived, however, the duel came to occupy an ambiguous place in nineteenth-century literature, not unlike gambling. In a society so stratified and closely watched, where every button was mandated, the right of a gentleman to duel became his right to define the limits of his own dignity and patience, to decide for himself how he would be punished and punish others. As soon as a challenge was issued, strict codes governed the response, whether or not the aggrieved party felt personal outrage. Failing to issue a challenge when provoked was also dishonorable. If a gentleman was insulted by a person who then refused to accept a challenge to a duel, or if a challenge that should have been issued for some reason was not, one means for the insulted party to restore his honor was to commit suicide, or at least to attempt it. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Part IV, ch. 18), the humiliated Count Vronsky shoots himself soon after his mistress Anna, near death with puerperal fever and just delivered of Vronsky’s child, is reconciled to her husband. As a point d’honneur, the deceived husband should have called out the lover. But Karenin, an enlightened government bureaucrat,

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refuses to be maneuvered by a military code he despises. Perhaps Vronsky, pressing his revolver to his chest and pulling the trigger, was in despair at losing Anna; but for certain he was desperate to restore his honor.