Irina Reyfman

The Emergence of the Duel in Russia: Corporal Punishment and the Honor Code

The first third of the nineteenth century stands out in Russian cultural memory as a period that saw the largest number of duels in the history of duelling in Russia. At that time, a passion for duelling permeated all segments of polite society and the duel became a working mechanism for resolving all kinds of conflicts, both serious and trivial-from quarrels over official business, to confrontations caused by social inequality within the nobility, to clashes brought about by sexual rivalry, cheating at cards, an awkward word, a joke, a scowl, a frown, and so on. The bretteur, a special type of reckless duellist, ready to fight at the slightest provocation, emerged and proliferated not only among the favored military youth but also among the intellectuals. The best representatives of the early nineteenth-century Russian nobility found it necessary to engage in duelling, maiming and killing their contemporaries and risking being maimed or killed themselves. The number of duels diminished toward the middle of the nineteenth century, but duelling did not disappear even when its original proponents, the nobility, had forfeited the cultural foreground. The duels high status, established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, survived almost intact until 1917 and, in a certain sense, until the present.1 Nineteenth-century Russian literature, which reflected the duels prominence in contemporary life and its importance as an ideological issue, frequently portrayed and discussed duels. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, literature, espe-

Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the "New" Russian Literature.

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