The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

As we shall see, Gogolian time-space has a different shape altogether. Although also comic, it cannot support anything like a wholesome appetite or a circular, homecoming plot. Honor is not relevant to it, although rules most definitely are. Gogol is Russia’s first Kafka, her supreme chronicler of bureaucracies and the insecurities of social life as it registers on the shy and the neurotic.Heis the patron saintof heroes who linearly bolt outofa narrative and disappear. Before we move to Gogol’s realm of Russian Romanticism, however, a few words are in order on the legacy of the first Belkin Tale, “The Shot.” It links Pushkin’s troubled consideration of the duel of honor in Eugene Onegin – the hero’s failure to prevent his best friend’s death – with a long Russian literary tradition of botched, parodied, or “estranged” duels. In each, the duel ends up testing some other sort of honorableness, some value deeper than a passing insult or a set of societal codes.

Duels

As love is displaced and misses its mark in Eugene Onegin, so are bullets displaced and (mercifully) go astray in “The Shot.” The narrative structure of this tiny story is so ingeniously layered and jointed that we forgive its banal, fantastical plot. The gothic hero Silvio, insulted at a ball, calls out his rival, a handsome and wealthy count. Obsessively jealous and infuriated by his opponent’s casu-alness at the duel, Silvio postpones his shot; the count graciously allows him to redeem it at any time. For several years Silvio plots his vengeance, awaiting a chance to test the courage of his opponent when the latter has something he fears to lose. A re-run of the duel finally occurs, in front of the count’s new wife. We slowly realize that Silvio can never satisfy his honor because the issue is not an isolated insult but the count’s whole personality, a blend of courage, self-respect, noble rank, and moral superiority. Such people are beyond testing. We discern a link between this Belkin Tale – a “little comedy,” since no one is

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killed in either duel – and Mozart and Salieri, one of the four “Little Tragedies” that Pushkin wrote during the same Boldino autumn, 1830. Salieri too cannot abide the natural superiority (in this case the musical genius) of his junior colleague and rival. His envy of Mozart is not triggered by any single “insult,” nor can it be answered by any single ritualized gesture. Both the confrontation and the insult are cosmic, so the desire to duel (combat between two men, equally armed) is replaced by the need to murder. When the duel becomes a test that goes beyond answering for an isolated deed, no manuals on dueling etiquette will help. The very existence of the superior rival constitutes the insult. This rival is unreachable, living on another plane. The envier can only look ridiculous (and knows he looks ridiculous) when he tries to “settle scores” with this more highly endowed being – regardless of the outcome of their duel.

The most subtle variant on the Silvio model in Russian literature after Pushkin is the duel between Pechorin and Grushnitsky in the “Princess Mary” segment of Lermontov’s novel Hero of Our Time (1840). Grigory Pechorin is a Byronic hero, one degree more burnt out and malicious than his close literary relative, Eugene Onegin. Pechorin’s friend Grushnitsky – a crooked shadow of himself, the double in the mirror he tries to avoid – is a fop, a conceited fool, a bad loser, far more juvenile and melodramatic than Onegin’s na¨ıve friend Lensky (perhaps because Grushnitsky is available to us only through Pechorin’s diary). On a Caucasus mountain cliff, the two men duel over an innocent maiden’s honor. But neither really cares about the maiden. At stake is their own honor, fatally mixed with injured pride. The duel has been rigged by Grushnitsky’s cronies, and Pechorin, knowing this, nevertheless faces his opponent’s bullet, survives the shot and secures his own honor. Pechorin then exposes 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¨ıve – 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.