SOURCE: Reyfman, Irina. “Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky: Bretteur and Apologist of the Duel.” In Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, edited by Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally, pp. 243-57. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Reyfman discusses Bestuzhev's many representations of dueling within his fiction, maintaining that the author was especially sensitive to the political implications of the practice he so passionately defended.

Dueling arrived in Russia later and also stopped later than in other European countries except Germany. Furthermore, it was transplanted at the time when complex social changes that shaped post-Petrine Russia were taking place. Most important, the assimilation of dueling paralleled the incorporation of the Russian nobility as a privileged class striving for autonomy from the central government. This was a two-sided process, the initiative coming both from the nobility itself and from Russian monarchs—the latter needing the incorporated...