Ritualized violence Russian style: the duel in Russian culture and literature

Abstract

Irina Reyfman. Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. xi, 364 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $49.50, cloth. The duel and its underlying codes of honour are the object of continuing fascination. In Ritualized Violence Russian Style, Irina Reyfman provides the first comprehensive history of the duel in Russia, and gives her own interpretations of why dueling became so popular especially in the nineteenth century. The book consists of two parts. The first is historical overview that discusses the Russian interpretation of honour in the Imperial era, the initial reluctance to adopt dueling (which, along with the honour code, is portrayed as an entirely Western transplant) and its eventual acceptance. Reyfman provides an exhaustive list of duels, but, as she comments, the details of many of these duels are unclear and it is impossible for any purely historical account to be complete. The second part of the book compensates for this with an analysis of dueling in Russian literature, especially in the works of Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Fedor Dostoevsky. One minor fault with the book is that some terms, such as bretteur and point d'honneur, are not defined the first time that they are introduced. Thus, if readers do not already understand the various nuances of meaning associated with them, they may have trouble following the text until the meaning of the terms becomes clear subsequently. Historians who have analysed dueling in European countries have tended to portray it as reactionary social phenomenon, designed to reinforce the dominance of the ruling aristocracy at time when its social position was under threat. Reyfman's interpretation is rather different. In her eyes the duel's popularity in Russia was result of its ability to protect an individual's physical inviolability and to act as protector of individual rights in society with inadequate legal safeguards. At one point she goes so far as to call the honour code a bill of rights. The duel owed its rise in Russia, Reyfman claims, to the persistence of Muscovite traditions of corporal punishment. Senior officials were prone to slap, punch and beat their subordinates. In pre-Petrine times, such physical abuse was not interpreted as dishonouring. But under the influence of Western thinking, Russian nobles began to object more strongly to this treatment and to guard themselves against it. …