By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Shortly after graduating, Pushkin—so lively a swordsman that he was nicknamed “the Cricket”—challenged his uncle to a duel for stealing his dancing partner at a country festival. Family intervened, and the fight was stopped. He once challenged a Greek merely for expressing surprise that he had not read a particular book. One winter he challenged Baron Korf, a former schoolmate, for taking a cane to Pushkin’s drunken servant, whom he accused of impudence. Korf chose sabers but would not fight his old friend over such a trifle, proposing instead that they drown their differences in champagne. This time the matter ended there. On another occasion, Pushkin was placed in protective custody for slapping the face of a Moldavian merchant whose pretty young wife had repulsed his advances at a party. He spent the fortnight in jail lying on his bed, shooting wax bullets from a dueling pistol at flies on the ceiling. Within weeks he was dueling again, reportedly waiting for his opponent to take the first shot while he nonchalantly ate cherries. The wife of a friend wrote in a letter that “Pushkin figures in a duel almost every day.”

  Pushkin’s last opponent was his brother-in-law Georges Charles d’Anthès, and the two met at 5 P.M. at an isolated spot on the Black River on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg—each twenty paces away from a barrier, pistols in hand. The river was frozen solid, the snow knee-deep. D’Anthès, who knew that to kill the famous poet would be disastrous for his military career, planned to give Pushkin no more than a flesh wound in the leg, but Pushkin wanted d’Anthès dead and rushed the barrier. To save himself, d’Anthès fired first, but his aim was off and the bullet took Pushkin in the lower abdomen.

  D’Anthès positioned himself sideways on, his pistol raised to protect his head, his other arm held against his chest, and waited to see what his stricken rival would do. “Bravo!” cried Pushkin, who fired, then tossed his pistol aside. The bullet went through d’Anthès’s right arm, was deflected by a button, and left him with no more than a few bruised ribs. But Pushkin was dying. In pain and bleeding badly, he was wrapped in a fur coat and borne home, still able to joke and tell dueling stories along the way. Back in his house, he looked around his study and addressed his books: “Farewell, friends.” He died the following morning, on his thirty-eighth birthday. His death was met with widespread grief and taken as evidence of the high tragic dignity of the duel. (Boris Pasternak arranged a duel against a fellow writer as late as 1914 on the anniversary of Pushkin’s encounter.) A Russian historian judged that Pushkin’s life “and even his death, now a national legend, have become in posterity’s eyes the paragon of high moral virtue, the measure of honor and dignity.”48

  Dueling had developed from a rare literary affectation at the beginning of the eighteenth century into a ubiquitous national pastime. Its semi-legalization in 1894, just as so many European nations were giving up the practice, provoked widespread discussion, from many points of view—social, legal, religious, and philosophical. Yet the debate, and the degree of empathy and disgust, were fiercest of all in Russian literature. Leo Tolstoy, for one, was keenly aware of dueling’s flaws: its cruelty and its capacity to overwhelm judgment and good sense. He accepts as much in his 1855 short story, “A Billiard Marker’s Notes.” Yet twice in those early years he issued challenges: first in 1856, when he was twenty-eight, to a journalist, Longinov. “God knows what will become of it,” he wrote two days after calling for the duel. “But I shall be firm and bold.” In the end friends pleaded with him, and Tolstoy reconsidered. Five years later, incensed over some perceived insult, he challenged Ivan Turgenev (himself the author of a short story called “The Duellist”), who wrote back a groveling apology—which he sent to the wrong address. This farcical disagreement lasted for nearly eight months before subsiding. By the time Tolstoy came to write War and Peace his views had changed: now he was most concerned about the duel’s dangerous ineluctability, the fact that, once set in motion, it was almost impossible to prevent a bloody conclusion. In the novel an almost inexorable force seems to drive the duel between Pierre Bezukhov and Dolokhov: “A feeling of dread was in the air. It was evident that the affair so lightly begun could no longer be averted but was taking its course independently of men’s will and had to unfold.”49 In Anna Karenina he uses Karenin’s reluctance to challenge his wife’s lover as an index of weak character: Karenin’s fear of dueling undermines any criticism he has to make of the practice.

  Dueling plays a role in several of Anton Chekhov’s plays but takes center stage in a novella, The Duel, written in 1891. Ivan Layevsky, twenty-eight, the typical Chekhovian “superfluous man,” a lazy failure, works in the Ministry of Finance. His mistress is Nadezhda, “the prettiest young woman in the town,” whom he neglects; while the town’s zoologist, Kolya von Koren, a German with “a resolute, strong, despotic nature,” openly despises him. Early on Layevsky acknowledges that “the duel is a survival of medieval barbarism,” yet, almost without intending to, filled with frustrated self-loathing, he ends up challenging his tormentor. Koren, speaking to the deacon Dr. Sheshkovsky, gives the story’s central speech:

  Here tomorrow we have a duel. You and I will say it’s stupid and absurd, that the duel is out of date, that there is no real difference between the aristocratic duel and the drunken brawl in the pit-house, and yet we shall not stop, we shall go there and fight. So there is some force stronger than our reasoning. We shout that war is plunder, robbery, atrocity, fratricide; we cannot look upon blood without fainting; but the French or the Germans have only to insult us to feel at once an exhalation of spirit; in the most genuine way we shout “Hurrah!” and rush to attack the foe. You will invoke the blessing of God on our weapons, and our valor will arouse universal and general enthusiasm. Again it follows there is a force, if not higher, at any rate stronger, than us and our philosophy. We can no more stop it than that cloud which is moving upwards towards the sea.50

  Dostoevsky was more sympathetic, and throughout his writing career harped on the duel’s ambiguous moral standing. He was the grandson of a priest and a merchant; and his father had been a doctor in a hospital for the poor, so the aristocratic ideals of the dueling code were alien to him. He never fought himself, had no personal experience with affairs of honor, and tried to work out in both his fiction and his essays how one could avoid fighting a duel without dishonor. He insisted that a man had the right and the obligation to defend himself—and that included the duel, which he felt was governed by character rather than by impersonal forces. His notes for A Writer’s Diary read in part:

  The duel. In a human being there is a personality as well as a citizen. A judge judges the citizen and sometimes does not see the personality at all. Therefore there is always the possibility that this invisible personality has some feeling that stays with him exclusively, and a judge will see nothing of it. Even the law cannot foresee all the subtleties. But to take away the personality and leave only the citizen is impossible.51

  In his novels, characters who choose to disregard the code of honor reveal themselves either as unprincipled or, worse, as spiritual monsters. Dostoevsky continued to ponder how one might avoid fighting a duel without losing one’s standing. Later in life he would come to see dueling, as Chekhov would, as a silly Western custom that Russians had imported to their detriment. In The Brothers Karamazov, written in his sixtieth year, he made this clear:

  “I think duels are so nice,” Maria Kondratievna remarked. “How so, miss?” “It’s so scary and brave, especially when fine young officers with pistols in their hands are shooting at each other because of some lady friend. Just like a picture. Oh, if only they let girls watch, I’d like terribly to see one.” “It’s fine when he’s doing the aiming, but when it’s his mug that’s being aimed at, there’s the stupidest feeling, miss. You’d run away from the place.”

  In nearly everything Dostoevsky published there is some mention of dueling (“The Landlady” and White Nights are the two exceptions), but at last he concluded, “European moral things should not be copied: vindictiveness, retaliation,
cruelty, chivalric honor—all this is very bad. Their faith is worse than ours.”52

  The debate, however, was being taken out of his hands. No institution can survive prolonged ridicule, and duelists were being mocked rather than admired. “To the age of railways, steamers and gaslight, of popular education and popular science, dueling appeared criminal and absurd,” wrote Woodham Smith. Legislation remained mostly unchanged, only now it was effective as duelists knew they would be apprehended. The activity had lost cultural legitimacy. New pastimes had emerged: organized football, cycling, competitive yachting for the well-off, and the pleasurable risks of mountaineering, barely known in 1800, yet by 1900 one of the glamorous new outdoor activities. Increasingly popular team games such as cricket and football promoted the tendency to regard the individual as primarily part of a larger group, and individual interests and needs were subordinated to those of the collective. For those who wanted to put their lives on the line, there were better ways of doing it than a duel at dawn: in southern Europe bullfighting was made more dangerous, while Franklin D. Roosevelt went “ice yachting” at 100 m.p.h., faster than any contemporary airplane. Duels continued; but as Oscar Wilde had said, to abolish war, show it not as wicked but as vulgar. Dueling had become vulgar. When in the 1890s Lord Queensberry publicly insulted Wilde at a London club, the latter started legal proceedings rather than issue a challenge. Although the language in which Wilde’s biographer reported the incident in 1918 was that of the duel—“challenge,” “mortal combat,” “fight,” “death duel”—single combat between two such contestants was no longer an option.53

  Richard Burton, writing as the century drew to its close, makes the same point: “The duel is one of those provisional arrangements which, like cannibalism, slavery, polygamy, and many others, belong to certain stages of society, and which drop off as decayed and dead matter when, no longer necessary, they become injurious excrescences upon the body social.” But, he adds, “Those who look only at the surface of things consider these temporary institutions as unmixed evils, forgetting the immense amount of good which they did in their own day.”54

  Dueling had been intertwined with the art of swordplay. Fencing in turn had borrowed much of its allure, as well as its skills and its code of honor. As dueling vanished, fencers suddenly felt a cold wind, as they found themselves practitioners of a sport with a compelling past but an uncertain future.

  * Rousseau himself hated most forms of exercise, but at twenty undertook fencing lessons. As he records in his Confessions:

  This was worse than being in the salle. After three months of instruction, I was still hitting a brick wall, incapable of putting an attack together, or being flexible enough or sufficiently strong to control my foil when my master attacked. I detested the whole business, in particular the master who was trying so hard to teach it to me. I found it incredible that anyone could take such pride in knowing how to kill a man. To bring his vast knowledge within the sphere of my understanding, my master would make comparisons with music (of which he was singularly ignorant) and delight in finding striking analogies between, say, tierce and quarte and the same terms in music. When he wanted to make a feint attack, he would tell me to look out for a “dummy,” because years ago dummies were called “feints” [les deizes]. When he beat my blade, and my foil jumped out of my hand, he would say with a snigger that this was a “break” [une pause]. To put it plainly, never in my life have I met such an insufferable pedant as this miserable creature with his plumet and plastron.3

  Rousseau’s antipathy to dueling may not have been fueled by moral disgust alone.

  † Browning’s interest in fencing per se stretches from brief asides about “the sports of youth—masks, gloves and foils” to details about how he would go on walks “passing lightly in review / What seemed hits and what seemed misses in a certain fence-play.” There is even a seemingly prescient reference to “the pale-electric sword.”6

  ‡ At the 2002 Antiquarian Book Fair in London, a dealer was offering a master’s diploma, hand-drawn and colored by French prisoners of war in Dartmoor Prison in 1811, awarded to an infantryman who had completed the course in prison and been recognized as competent to teach fencing by twenty-six of his fellow prisoners, who had fought in the Peninsula War.

  § Ironically, Conrad himself fought a duel. In February 1878 he was living in Marseilles and fell in love with a fellow Pole, Paula de Somogyi. She was also subjected to the attentions of a Captain J. K. Blunt, “American, Catholic and gentleman.” The two men fought with pistols, and Conrad, lightly wounded, bore the scar on his chest for the rest of his life. He used the experience—even keeping Blunt’s name—in his novel The Arrow of Gold, published in 1920, just a few years before “The Duel” appeared in print.

  ‖ In one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, “The Duel of Dr. Hirsch,” a character tellingly comments, “I cannot speak like Clemenceau and Deroulède, for their words are like echoes of their pistols. The French ask for a duelist as the English ask for a sportsman.” Chesterton evidently had a fondness for dueling, and he brought it into at least three of his stories. In “The Chief Mourner of Marne” he inserted a speech that probably reflects his own views on the morality of the practice: “It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.”40

  a A few masters taught during the reign of the czars. The most prominent was Adolphe Grisier, who spent ten years teaching various princes and noblemen of the imperial court. His book Les Armes et le Duel is dedicated to His Imperial Majesty, Nicholas I. From the time of the Russian Revolution until 1945, fencing was considered a bourgeois sport and effectively ceased to exist. The Soviet Union first participated in international competition in 1946 and went on to dominate the field.47

  Court dress is not likely to be required. Top hats and frock coats are almost certain to be wanted.

  —ADVICE FROM THE FOREIGN OFFICE TO THE BRITISH TEAM IN THE 1906 OLYMPICS

  The marksman’s special skill was drifting towards sport, as archery had, as swordplay had, as throwing the javelin and the hammer had; the commonplace weapon of one age becoming the Olympic medal of the next.

  —DICK FRANCIS, Twice Shy, 1982

  KARL MARX LEARNED TO FENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BONN. He was copresident of a private society called the Trier Tavern Club, about thirty students whose main purpose was to get drunk as frequently and riotously as possible. The Trier crowd regularly came to blows with members of the Borussia (meaning “where Prussians gather”) Korps, and eventually Marx received a challenge to a saber duel.1 The future revolutionary—a “short-sighted swot,” his biographer Francis Wheen calls him—found himself up against a trained soldier and was lucky to get away with a slight cut above his left eye. “Is dueling so closely interwoven with philosophy?” his father wrote to him in despair. “Do not let this inclination … this craze, take root.” In 1837 Marx left for Berlin and more sober studies, but was still keen to show his fencing mettle when he arrived in London in 1851, virtually an exile. It did not take him long to make contact with a certain Emmanuel Barthélemy, a fencing master with something of a reputation who had arrived in the capital the previous year.

  Barthélemy was a French revolutionary who had been active in secret societies during the reign of Louis-Philippe. At seventeen he had been imprisoned for killing a police agent, but had been released in a general amnesty in 1847, after serving ten years. Not content to follow his calling as a fencing coach, he took part in the June uprising of 1848, was sentenced to life in prison, and managed to escape to London in the summer of 1850. Within weeks of his arrival he had opened a salle in Rathbone Place, off Oxford Street, “where fencing with sabers, épées and foils and pistol-shooting could be practiced.” It was there that Marx met
him.

  What we know of Barthélemy and of the author of Das Kapital as a sabreur comes from the memoirs of Wilhelm Liebknecht, Marx’s companion in many a pub crawl, a lifelong member of his university dueling corps, and a fellow socialist. Liebknecht relates how Barthélemy, “a fierce-eyed muscular ruffian” who still bore on his shoulder the indelible brand of a galley convict, became a frequent visitor to Marx’s house: “Mrs Marx did not like him. There was something uncanny about him, and she found his piercing eyes repulsive.”2 But Barthélemy was useful to Marx both on and off the piste—furnishing him, for instance, with firsthand accounts of revolutionary activity that Marx used to good effect when he turned his series of articles The Class Struggles in France into a book.

  Marx attended Barthélemy’s salle regularly, giving “lusty battle” to his coach. “What he [Marx] lacked in science he tried to make up in aggressiveness,” Liebknecht recorded, “and unless you were cool-headed he could really startle you.” There is no evidence as to how good Marx was, but one can imagine how the great advocate of proletarian revolution might have fought—with controlled fury. Liebknecht noted that he rarely took notice of the opinion of others and that his usual reaction to opposition was anger.

  Barthélemy was a good teacher, but his heart was still with the Revolution. He befriended one of Marx’s enemies, the revolutionary August Willich, and announced that he would no longer give Marx lessons: he was insufficiently radical and “would not conspire and disturb the peace.” Within a few weeks Barthélemy agreed to second Willich, who had called Marx out. Marx refused the challenge, which was taken up by a friend, who was critically wounded by a bullet in the head. Barthélemy and Marx never spoke again.

  Two years later Barthélemy fought his own duel over a political difference and killed his opponent outright. Once more he found himself in prison but somehow managed to get out in two months. Thereafter he was shunned by the London émigré community. Undaunted, he hit upon a new plan: he would assassinate Napoleon III. “To make quite sure,” Liebknecht explains, “he planned to shoot him not with a bullet but with deer shot steeped in sulphur; and if that did not work he would stab him.” In December 1854 Barthélemy obtained an invitation for the next grand ball at the Tuileries, but on his way to the ship that was to take him to France he suddenly remembered that he was owed money by an ex-employer. As he was near the man’s home, he decided to stop by, words turned to blows, and Barthélemy killed two men.