Canadian Slavonic Papers

Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature by IrinaReyfmanReview by: Paul RobinsonCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 42, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 2000),pp. 415-416Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870206 .

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Book Reviews 415

the French. And, given that authors and thinkers such as Kafka, Musil and Nietzsche are points of reference in his work, there may be too little discussion of influences from the German tradition. It is unfortunate that there are no recent interviews with Kundera.

Johannes F. Welfing, The University of Lethbridge

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 a 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 a reactionary social phenomenon, designed to reinforce the dominance of the ruling aristocracy at a time when its social position was under threat.

Reyfman's interpretation is rather different. In her eyes the duel's popularity in Russia was a result of its ability to protect an individual's physical inviolability and to act as a protector of individual rights in a 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. The duel was the system of protection that they adopted. Superiors who physically abused their subordinates would now find themselves being challenged to a duel, and so were deterred. At the same time a slap became interpreted as a demand to be challenged. Since duels can only be fought between social equals, the slapper thereby recognised the person he slapped as an equal. The slap, once seen as the most humiliating of acts, lost its ability to humiliate.

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLII, No. 3, September 2000

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416 Book Reviews

Under this interpretation the duel emerges as a more progressive than reactionary social phenomenon, one which played an important role in instilling a sense of the rights of individuals. Indeed Reyfman notes that the emerging classes in Russia - the raznochintsy - became enthusiastic duelers, and that in the early nineteenth century dueling was even seen as an act of defiance against autocracy.

Reyfman's analysis is original and very convincing, with a mass of examples being used to substantiate it. However, one feels that it cannot be the whole answer to the question of why dueling became so popular in Russia. Many of the examples she gives do not actually involve any physical abuse, and were instead disputes over matters such as love, which do not fit easily into her analysis. At the same time Reyfman's interpretation puts the emphasis on the individual, but the legalisation of dueling in Russia in 1894 created a system in which collective honour took precedence over individual honour. An army officer could not issue a challenge by himself. Before doing so he had to ask permission from his regimental Court of Honour. If the Court considered that he or the regiment had been insulted, the officer was obliged to issue a challenge. In short, his personal honour was no longer his property but that of his unit. Collective honour now took precedence, and duels were fought for the benefit of the collective not the individual. This behaviour does not seem to fit into the pattern drawn up by Irina Reyfman.

The problem may be that we have too little knowledge about the dueling system in Imperial Russia. Nancy Shields-Kollman has recently provided us with a detailed analysis of honour in Muscovite times. A similar study of honour in Imperial Russia is probably now due. Irina Reyfman's book will be an invaluable starting point for anyone embarking on this task.

Paul Robinson, Royal Military College

Vladimir Shlyakhov and Eve Adler. Dictionary of Russian Slang and Colloquial Expressions / PyccKHH cjieHr. Second Edition. New York:

Barrons, 1999. 296 pp. $17.50, paper. Svitlana Pyrkalo. lurii Mosenkis, ed. Pershyi slovnyk ukrains'koho molodizhnoho slenhu [First Dictionary of Ukrainian Youth Slang]. Kyiv: AT VIPOL, 1998. 84 pp, paper.

Publications like these can substantially supplement textbooks and dictionaries employed in the second language classroom. The cover of Shlyakov's and Adler's volume advertises "more than 5000 words and their popular meanings that you won't find in standard Russian-English dictionaries." Today the high and low registers of a language often coexist not only in crime novels but also in newspapers, on TV, and even in everyday conversations. To understand them it is necessary to become acquainted with slang. Among North American students there is enormous interest in Russian and Ukrainian slang. Representing the most fluctuating aspect of a language, slang can be perceived as the pulse of life of any community of speakers. Scholars wishing to study recent changes in any language are naturally drawn to slang.

This is the second edition of The Dictionary of Russian Slang and Colloquial Expressions. It includes: 1) widely used colloquialisms and street language; 2)

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