The time depicted in the work is a duel. Duel (story), plot, characters. The deep crisis of the Tsarist army

Still from the film “Shurochka” (1982)

Classes in the sixth company are coming to an end. Junior officers begin to compete - who can better cut down a clay effigy with a saber. It’s the turn of the young second lieutenant Grigory Romashov.

He was of average height, thin, and although quite strong for his build, he was awkward due to his great shyness.

Romashov didn’t know how to fence even in school, and now he can’t do anything.

Second Lieutenant Romashov spends all evenings until midnight with the Nikolaevs. During the day he promises himself not to go, not to bother people, but in the evening of the next day he returns to this cozy home.

At home, the Romashovs find a letter from Raisa Alexandrovna Peterson, with whom they are dirty, boring and have been deceiving her husband for quite some time. The cloying smell of Raisa's perfume and the vulgarly playful tone of the letter evoke unbearable disgust in Romashov.

Half an hour later, embarrassed and annoyed with himself, Romashov knocks on the Nikolaevs’ door. Vladimir Efimych Nikolaev is busy. For two years in a row he has been failing his academy exams. You can only apply three times, and his wife Alexandra Petrovna, Shurochka, is doing everything to ensure that the last chance is not missed. Helping her husband prepare, Shurochka has already mastered the entire program; she is only struggling with ballistics, while Volodya is progressing very slowly. Shurochka wants her husband to pass the exams and take her away from this wilderness.

Am I really so uninteresting as a person and ugly as a woman that I should spend my whole life in this slum, in this disgusting place that is not on any geographical map!

With Romochka (that’s what she calls Romashov), Shurochka discusses a newspaper article about fights recently allowed in the army. She considers them necessary, otherwise the officers will not breed a cheater or a drunkard like Nazansky. Romashov does not want to enroll Nazansky in this company, who believes that the ability to love, like talent, is not given to everyone. Shurochka once rejected this man, and her husband hates the lieutenant. This time Romashov sits with the Nikolaevs until it’s time to sleep.

At home, another note from Peterson awaits him, in which she threatens Romashov with cruel revenge for his neglect of her. The woman knows where Romashov goes every day and who he is interested in.

At the next regimental ball, Romashov tells his mistress that it’s all over. Peterson's wife swears revenge. Soon Nikolaev begins to receive anonymous letters with hints about the special relationship between the second lieutenant and his wife. Romashov is not sure that Raisa writes anonymous letters. Grigory has plenty of ill-wishers - he does not allow officers to fight, he forbids beating soldiers.

The authorities are also dissatisfied with Romashov. The second lieutenant’s money is getting worse; the bartender no longer even lets him borrow cigarettes. Romashov’s soul is bad due to the feeling of boredom, the meaninglessness of service and loneliness.

At the end of April, Romashov receives a note from Alexandra Petrovna reminding him of their common name day. Having borrowed money from Lieutenant Colonel Rafalsky, Romashov buys perfume and goes to the Nikolaevs. At a noisy picnic, Romashov sits next to Shurochka and experiences a strange state, similar to a dream. His hand sometimes touches Shurochka’s hand, but they don’t look at each other.

He saw that some great, new, feverish feeling was flowing, trembling and asking to come out.

After the feast, Romashov wanders into the grove. Shurochka follows and says that today she is in love with him, and the day before she saw him in a dream. Romashov begins to talk about love. She admits that she is worried about his closeness, they have common thoughts and desires, but she must abandon him. Shurochka doesn’t want them to be missed and goes back. On the way, she asks Romashov not to visit them anymore: her husband is besieged by anonymous letters.

In mid-May, the corps commander tours the companies lined up on the parade ground, looks at their training and remains dissatisfied. Only the fifth company, where soldiers are not tortured with shagistics and are not stolen from the common cauldron, deserves praise.

During the ceremonial march, Romashov feels himself the subject of general admiration. Lost in his daydreaming, he breaks down the formation.

His entire half-company, instead of two straight, slender lines, was an ugly crowd, broken in all directions, crowded together like a flock of sheep.

Instead of delight, he suffers public shame. To this is added an explanation with Nikolaev, demanding to stop the flow of anonymous messages and not to visit their house. Romashov admits that he knows the author of the anonymous letters and promises to preserve Shurochka’s reputation.

Going over what happened in his memory, Romashov unnoticed approaches the railway track and in the darkness sees a soldier who is constantly being bullied in the company. He asks the soldier if he would like to kill himself, and he, choking with sobs, says that they beat him, laugh at him, the platoon commander extorts money, and he is unable to study: he has suffered from a hernia since childhood.

Now his own troubles seem trivial to Romashov. He understands: faceless companies and regiments consist of such soldiers, suffering from their grief and having their own destiny.

From this night, Romashov changes - he often secludes himself and avoids the company of regimental officers.

He seemed to have matured, become older and more serious in recent days, and he himself noticed this by the sad and even calm with which he now treated people and phenomena.

The forced distance from officer society allows Romashov to concentrate on his thoughts. He sees more and more clearly that there are only three worthy callings: science, art and free physical labor.

At the end of May, a soldier in Osadchy’s company hanged himself. After this incident, continuous drinking begins. Romashov finds Nikolaev at the meeting. There is a quarrel between them. Nikolaev swings at Romashov, and he throws the remains of beer in his face.

A meeting of the officer's court of honor is scheduled. Nikolaev asks Romashov not to mention his wife and anonymous letters. The court determines that the quarrel cannot be ended by reconciliation.

Romashov spends most of the day before the fight with Nazansky, who convinces him not to shoot. Life is an amazing and unique phenomenon. Is he really so committed to the military class, does he really believe in the supposed higher meaning of the army order so much that he is ready to risk his very existence?

In the evening, Romashov finds Shurochka at his home. She says she spent years building her husband's career. If Romochka refuses to fight for the sake of love for her, then there will still be something dubious about it and Volodya will probably not be allowed to take the exam. They must shoot each other, but not one of them must be wounded. The husband knows and agrees. She hugs his neck and presses her hot lips to his mouth.

And so both of them, and the whole room, and the whole world were immediately filled with some unbearably blissful, sultry delirium.

Some time later, Shurochka leaves forever.

The details of the duel between Lieutenant Nikolaev and Second Lieutenant Romashov are described in the report to the colonel. When, on command, the opponents went to meet each other halfway, Lieutenant Nikolaev wounded the second lieutenant in the upper right abdomen with a shot, and he died seven minutes later from internal hemorrhage. The report is accompanied by the testimony of the junior doctor.

The ideological and artistic originality of the story The Duel.

Appearing during Russo-Japanese War and in the context of the growth of the first Russian revolution, the work caused a huge public outcry, since it undermined one of the main pillars of the autocratic state - the inviolability of the military caste. The problems of “The Duel” go beyond the traditional war story. Kuprin touches on the question of the causes of social inequality of people, and possible ways the liberation of man from spiritual oppression, and about the problem of the relationship between the individual and society, the intelligentsia and the people. The plot of the work is built on the vicissitudes of the fate of an honest Russian officer, whom the conditions of army barracks life make him think about the wrong relationships between people. The feeling of spiritual decline haunts not only Romashov, but also Shurochka. The comparison of two heroes, who are characterized by two types of worldviews, is generally characteristic of Kuprin. Both heroes strive to find a way out of the impasse, while Romashov comes to the idea of ​​​​protesting against bourgeois prosperity and stagnation, and Shurochka adapts to it, despite the outward ostentatious rejection. The author’s attitude towards her is ambivalent; he is closer to Romashov’s “reckless nobility and noble lack of will.” Kuprin even noted that he considers Romashov to be his double, and the story itself is largely autobiographical. Romashov is a “natural man”, he instinctively resists injustice, but his protest is weak, his dreams and plans are easily destroyed, because... they are immature and unthought-out, often naive. Romashov is close to Chekhov's heroes. But the emerging need for immediate action strengthens his will to actively resist. After meeting with the soldier Khlebnikov, “humiliated and insulted,” a turning point occurs in Romashov’s consciousness; he is shocked by the man’s readiness to commit suicide, in which he sees the only way out of a martyr’s life. The sincerity of Khlebnikov’s impulse especially clearly indicates to Romashov the stupidity and immaturity of his youthful fantasies, which only aimed to “prove” something to others. Romashov is shocked by the intensity of Khlebnikov’s suffering, and it is the desire to sympathize that makes the second lieutenant think for the first time about the fate of the common people. However, Romashov’s attitude towards Khlebnikov is contradictory: conversations about humanity and justice bear the imprint of abstract humanism, Romashov’s call for compassion is in many ways naive.

In “The Duel,” Kuprin continues the traditions of psychological analysis by L.N. Tolstoy: in the work one can hear, in addition to the protesting voice of the hero himself, who saw the injustice of a cruel and stupid life, and the author’s accusatory voice (Kazansky’s monologues). Kuprin uses Tolstoy’s favorite technique - the technique of substituting a reasoner for the main character. In “The Duel,” Nazansky is the bearer of social ethics. Nazansky’s image is ambiguous: his radical mood (critical monologues, romantic premonition of a “radiant life”, anticipation of future social upheavals, hatred of the lifestyle of the military caste, the ability to appreciate high, pure love, feel the spontaneity and beauty of life) conflicts with his own image life. The only salvation from moral death is for the individualist Nazansky and for Romashov to escape from all social ties and obligations.

Composition

"Duel"

In 1905, the story “The Duel,” dedicated to M. Gorky, was published in the collection “Knowledge” (No. 6). It was published during the Tsushima tragedy1 and immediately became a significant social and literary event. The hero of the story, Second Lieutenant Romashov, to whom Kuprin gave autobiographical features, also tried to write a novel about the military: “He was drawn to write a story or a great novel, the outline of which would be the horror and boredom of military life.”

An artistic story (and at the same time a document) about a stupid and rotten officer caste to the core, about an army that rested only on the fear and humiliation of soldiers, was welcomed by the best part of the officer corps. Kuprin received grateful reviews from different parts of the country. However, most of the officers, typical heroes of the Duel, were outraged.

The story has several thematic lines: the officer environment, the combat and barracks life of soldiers, personal relationships between people. “In terms of their... purely human qualities, the officers of Kuprin’s story are very different people. ...almost every officer has the necessary minimum of “good feelings”, bizarrely mixed with cruelty, rudeness, and indifference” (O.N. Mikhailov). Colonel Shulgovich, Captain Sliva, Captain Osadchiy are different people, but they are all retrogrades of army education and training. Young officers, besides Romashov, are represented by Vetkin, Bobetinsky, Olizar, Lobov, Bek-Agamalov. As the embodiment of everything rude and inhuman among the officers of the regiment, Captain Osadchy stands out. A man of wild passions, cruel, full of hatred for everything, a supporter of cane discipline, he is opposed to the main character of the story, Second Lieutenant Romashov.

Against the background of degraded, rude officers and their wives, immersed in “cupids” and “gossip,” Alexandra Petrovna Nikolaeva, Shurochka, seems unusual. For Romashov she is ideal. Shurochka is one of Kuprin’s most successful female images. She is attractive, smart, emotional, but also reasonable and pragmatic. Shurochka seems to be truthful by nature, but lies when her interests require it. She preferred Nikolaev to Kazansky, whom she loved, but who could not take her away from the outback. “Dear Romochka,” who is close to her in his spiritual structure, who loves her ardently and unselfishly, captivates her, but also turns out to be an unsuitable match.

The image of the main character of the story is given in dynamics. Romashov, being at first in the circle of book ideas, in the world of romantic heroics and ambitious aspirations, gradually begins to see the light. This image most fully embodied the features of Kuprin’s hero - a man with a sense of self-esteem and justice, he is easily vulnerable, often defenseless. Among the officers, Romashov does not find like-minded people, everyone is strangers to him, with the exception of Nazansky, in conversations with whom he takes his soul away. The painful emptiness of army life pushed Romashov into a relationship with the regimental “seductress,” Captain Peterson’s wife Raisa. Of course, this soon becomes unbearable for him.

In contrast to other officers, Romashov treats soldiers humanely. He shows concern for Khlebnikov, who is constantly humiliated and downtrodden; he may, contrary to the regulations, tell the senior officer about another injustice, but he is powerless to change anything in this system. The service oppresses him. Romashov comes to the idea of ​​denying war: “Let’s say, tomorrow, let’s say, this very second this thought came to everyone’s minds: Russians, Germans, British, Japanese... and now there is no more war, no more officers and soldiers, everyone has gone home "

Romashov is a type of passive dreamer; his dream serves not as a source of inspiration, not as a stimulus for direct action, but as a means of escape, escape from reality. The attractiveness of this hero lies in his sincerity.

Having experienced a mental crisis, he enters into a kind of duel with this world. The duel with the hapless Nikolaev, which ends the story, becomes a particular expression of Romashov’s irreconcilable conflict with reality. However, simple, ordinary, “natural” Romashov, who stands out from his environment, with tragic inevitability turns out to be too weak and lonely to gain the upper hand. Devoted to his beloved, charming, life-loving, but selfishly calculating Shurochka, Romashov dies.

In 1905, Kuprin witnessed the execution of rebel sailors on the cruiser Ochakov and helped hide several survivors from the cruiser. These events were reflected in his essay “Events in Sevastopol”, after the publication of which a lawsuit was opened against Kuprin - he was forced to leave Sevastopol within 24 hours.

1907-1909 was a difficult period in Kuprin’s creative and personal life, accompanied by feelings of disappointment and confusion after the defeat of the revolution, family troubles, and a break with “Znanie.” Changes also occurred in the writer's political views. A revolutionary explosion still seemed inevitable to him, but now it frightened him a lot. “Disgusting ignorance will finish off beauty and science...” he writes (“The Army and the Revolution in Russia”).

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The story by A.I. Kuprin was published in May 1905. The author continued in it with a description of army life. From sketches of the life of a provincial garrison grows a social generalization of the decomposition of not only the army, but also the country as a whole, state system.

This is a story about a crisis that has engulfed various areas Russian life. The general hatred corroding the army is a reflection of the enmity that gripped Tsarist Russia.

In “The Duel,” as in none of his other works, Kuprin depicted with great artistic force the moral decay of the officers, showing stupid commanders devoid of any glimpses of civil service. He showed muzzled, intimidated soldiers, dull from senseless drill, such as the puny left-flank soldier Khlebnikov. Even if they met humane officers, they were subjected to ridicule, died senselessly, like Second Lieutenant Romashov, or became drunkards, like Nazansky.

Kuprin made his hero a humane, but weak and quiet man who does not fight evil, but suffers from it. Even the hero's surname - Romashov - emphasized the gentleness and gentleness of this person.

Kuprin draws Georgy Romashov with compassion and sympathy, but also with the author's irony. The story of Romashov, externally connected with the army, is not just the story of a young officer. This is history young man, who is experiencing what Kuprin calls the “period of maturation of the soul.” Romashov grows morally throughout the story, finds answers to very important questions for himself. He suddenly comes to the conclusion that the army is unnecessary, but understands this very naively. It seems to him that All of humanity should say “I don’t want to!” - and war will become unthinkable and the army will die out.

Second Lieutenant Romashov decides to break with those around him and understands that every soldier has his own “I”. He outlined completely new connections with the world. The title of the story has the same generalizing solution as its main conflict. Throughout the story there is a duel between the young man, reborn for the new, and the various forces of the old. Kuprin writes not about a duel of honor, but about murder in a duel.

The final treacherous blow was dealt to Romashov in love. Disdain for the weak, hatred of the feeling of pity, which sounded in Nazansky’s speeches, is carried out in practice by Shurochka. Despising environment and her morality, Shurochka Nikolaeva turns out to be an integral part of her. The plot of the story ends symbolically: the old world throws all its might against the man who has begun to spread his wings.

In the summer and autumn of 1905, Kuprin's story stirred up readers in the Russian army and throughout the country, and very soon its translations appeared in the main European languages. The writer receives not only the broadest all-Russian fame, but also all-European fame.

The story “The Duel” was written and published by A.I. Kuprin in 1905. Many considered and still consider this work to be the best of all that the writer created during his long creative life. The “duel” was indeed given by A.I. Kuprin has a real name in Russian literature, putting him on a par with his great contemporaries: Gorky, Chekhov, Bunin. Meanwhile, the story was received ambiguously by Russian educated society, as well as in the military environment of the 1910s. After the events of 1917 and the bloody Civil War that followed, the author’s own attitude towards the content of his already well-known work changed radically.

The history of the story

A.I. Kuprin’s story “The Duel” is largely autobiographical. It is based on the personal impressions of the author, a graduate of the Alexander School, who served for four years as a young officer in the provincial town of Proskurov, Podolsk province. Perhaps A.I. Kuprin, due to his character, personality and temperament, was not created for military service at all, especially in peacetime. But the future writer did not choose the military profession for himself: that’s how life turned out. His mother, a widow, not having the means to give her son a decent education, sent the boy to a military gymnasium, which was later transformed into cadet corps. Resentment for lack of freedom own choice affected Kuprin’s entire subsequent military career, as well as in his literary creativity. As if in a distorting mirror, it was reflected on the pages of many of the writer’s “military” works and, to the greatest extent, in the story “The Duel.”

Despite the presence of a number of memoirs and other evidence, the history of the creation of the story “The Duel” is extremely contradictory. Some of its nuances still raise questions among literary scholars, biographers, and researchers of A.I. Kuprin’s work.

Well-known sources indicate that the idea of ​​a large work (novel) about the life of Russian officers in a remote province was born to the writer in the early 1890s.

In 1893, in an undated letter to N.K. Mikhailovsky, Kuprin mentions his work on a great novel:

“I’m writing a long novel, The Grieving and the Embittered, but I can’t get past chapter 5.”

Neither Kuprin's biographers, nor in his subsequent correspondence, make any further mention of this novel. There is also no information that this work was dedicated to army life. However, most researchers consider “The Mourning and the Embittered” to be the first version of “The Duel,” which the author did not like and abandoned it.

In the 1890s, a number of Kuprin’s stories appeared in print, dedicated to the life and customs of Russian officers, but Kuprin turned to a new major work from the life of the military only in 1902-1903.

While Kuprin was thinking about the plot and collecting materials, German writer Fritz von Kürburg, writing under the pseudonym Fritz-Oswald Bilse, published his novel “Aus einer kleinen Garrison” (“In a small garrison”). This book, which aimed to expose the crude soldiery, caste isolation, vulgar arrogance and stupidity of the German military, was a huge success. A lawsuit was brought against the author, which caused a wide public outcry not only in Kaiser Germany, but also in other European countries. Bilse-Kürburg, by order of Emperor Wilhelm II, was excluded from military service. Already in 1903-1904, critical articles devoted to the “Little Garrison” appeared in the Russian magazines “Russian Wealth” and “Education”. In 1904, several translations of this work by Bilse were published into Russian and other European languages.

“My misfortune,” Kuprin said in an interview in 1910, “is that when I think of something and while I’m getting ready to write what I’ve planned, someone will definitely write it in the meantime. This was the case with “Yama”, “Olga Eruzalem” appeared, and this was also the case with “Duel” in 1902, when Bilse’s notes “In a small garrison” appeared. Even my "Duel" was translated into French like this: “La petite garrison russe.”

The topic was intercepted from Kuprin. “The Duel” was conceived by the author as an autobiographical, confessional work. But for publishers and readers at the beginning of the new, 20th century, the personal experiences of an army officer in the late 1880s were of little interest. The story must have contained an accusatory subtext that was fashionable at that time. Without him it was impossible to count on success.

During this period, A.I. Kuprin, by his own later admission, was entirely under the influence of A.M. Gorky and writers close to him, who consider it their calling and duty to scourge social ills. In those years, Gorky was indeed perceived by Russian society as the most prominent exponent of advanced political thought in fiction. His connection with the Social Democrats, revolutionary actions and government repressions against him were before everyone's eyes; almost every new work of his was not so much a literary as a political event. For Kuprin, Gorky was also not just a literary authority or a more successful writer. The voice of the “petrel of the revolution” sounded like the voice of a new creator of history, a prophet and arbiter of future changes.

After the publication of Bilse’s book, it was Gorky who convinced the author of “The Duel” that work on the work he had started should be continued. Back then, Kuprin believed that he was writing a great “novel” about what he saw and personally experienced, that he would be able to combine all his impressions with the requirements of the pre-revolutionary time and thereby “fit into the era.” It turned out to be not so simple. The progress of work on the book did not satisfy him. In search of inspiration, Kuprin rushed from city to city: he went to Balaklava, then lived a little in Odessa, at the end of 1904 he returned to St. Petersburg, where he again actively communicated with A.M. Gorky. However, the socially acute, topical “novel” about army life did not work out.

Only the image of Lieutenant Romashov, which he finally found, helped Kuprin to connect the incompatible. A vulnerable, trusting person, essentially deeply alien to both the military profession and the harsh realities of garrison life, with mental suffering perceives the reality around him: the lack of rights of soldiers, the emptiness and lack of spirituality of many officers, class prejudices, established army traditions and customs. The story masterfully conveys the “horror and boredom” of garrison life, but at the same time a heartfelt hymn to true love is created, through the hero’s lips a firm belief in the victory of the human spirit is expressed.

According to the recollections of Kuprin’s relatives, in the winter of 1904-1905, work on “The Duel” froze again. Kuprin was not confident of success, he found any excuse not to work on the story: he drank, led a disorderly lifestyle, and was surrounded by unfulfilled obligations, debts, and creditors. They even wrote this poem about him: “If truth is in wine, how many truths are there in Kuprin?”

Initially, “The Duel” was intended for the magazine “God’s World,” the publisher of which was A.I. Kuprin’s mother-in-law, Alexandra Arkadyevna Davydova, but when, during 1904-1905, Kuprin became especially close to Gorky, he decided to place his novel in the next volume of Gorky’s collection "Knowledge". (Reported this in a letter dated August 25, 1904 from Odessa).

Subsequently, Alexander Ivanovich himself admitted that he completed the story “The Duel” only thanks to the sincere friendly participation of M. Gorky:

"A. M. Gorky was a touching comrade in literature, he knew how to support and encourage in time. I remember that I abandoned “The Duel” many times, it seemed to me that it was not done brightly enough, but Gorky, after reading the written chapters, was delighted and even shed tears. If he had not inspired me with confidence to work, I probably would not have finished my novel.”

Elsewhere, Kuprin characterizes Gorky’s role in the creation of the novel with even greater certainty: “The Duel would not have appeared in print if not for the influence of Alexei Maksimovich. During the period of my lack of faith in my creative powers, he helped me a lot.”

But there is other evidence. A.I. Kuprin has always been a man of passions, and the decisive role in the work on the story, most likely, was played not by Gorky’s friendly participation, but by the persistence of the writer’s adored wife, Maria Karlovna Davydova. She was tired of observing attacks of creative doubts, which were expressed in Kuprin, as a rule, in drunken revelry and causeless idleness. Maria Karlovna simply kicked her husband out of the house, declaring that he should not appear on the doorstep without the next chapter of “The Duel.” This method turned out to be more than effective. Kuprin rented a room and, having written the next chapter, hurried to his family apartment, climbed the stairs, pushed the manuscript through the door that was ajar with a chain. Then he sat down on the steps and waited patiently for Maria Karlovna to read and let him in. One day, to see his wife, Alexander Ivanovich brought a chapter he had already read earlier, and the door slammed loudly. “Executed! Indeed he was executed!” - he repeated in confusion, unable to get up and leave...

Thus, through the joint efforts of the spouses, the story was completed and published in the next collection of the publishing company “Knowledge” in May 1905.

Reaction of contemporaries

May 1905. The whole country was under the heavy impression of the military failures of the Russian army and navy in Far East. The “small victorious war” turned into huge casualties. In those days, it was rare that a family did not mourn the officers, soldiers and sailors who perished on the hills of distant Manchuria and died in the battles of Tsushima and Port Arthur. After the January execution, general dissatisfaction with the government grew stronger and more powerful, soon developing into a revolutionary movement. And suddenly, A.I. Kuprin’s story “The Duel” appears.

Despite the fact that the story dealt with events more than ten years ago (duels in the army were allowed in the peaceful year of 1894), the so-called “progressive public” perceived the story as a more than modern and topical work. Even the least attentive and far-sighted reader was easily able to discern in “The Duel” an explanation of the reasons for Russia’s military failures solely through the depravity of its long-rotten state system.

Is it any wonder that under these conditions, newspaper and magazine criticism received Kuprin’s story with a bang. A week after the release of “The Duel,” the newspaper “Slovo” published an article by M. Chunosov (I.I. Yasinsky) “The Monster of Militarism,” in which the author called Kuprin’s work a bold indictment against bureaucracy, militarism and monarchical militarism. He was actively echoed by other critics of the democratic camp: V. Lvov (Rogachevsky), Izmailov, Lunacharsky, etc. The future Soviet People's Commissar of Education in his article “On Honor” wrote:

However, a significant part of Russian society, in contrast to the positive assessment of criticism and the press, perceived “The Duel” as a scandalous libel, almost a spit in the face of all those who sacrificed their lives in the interests of the Fatherland in the Far Eastern theater of military operations.

A critic of the very popular conservative newspaper “Moskovskie Vedomosti” A. Basargin (A.I. Vvedensky) described “The Duel” as “an unscrupulous pamphlet full of sloppy insinuations,” “obscene babble from someone else’s voice in the tone of the general trend of the “Knowledge” collections.”

The military could not agree with Kuprin either. Some of them, like Lieutenant General P.A. Geisman, who published a rather harsh article about the “Duel” in the military official “Russian Invalid”, really “went too far.” Recognizing Kuprin’s literary talent as a “writer of everyday life,” the general sincerely did not advise the author to touch on what he, in his opinion, does not know:

“Women, flirting, adultery, etc. - this is his genre,” reasoned General Geisman, declaring in conclusion: “That’s where we advise him to direct his attention and his abilities. And it’s better for him not to talk about war, military science, military art, military affairs and the military world in general. For him, these “grapes are green.” He can write pictures without explanations, but nothing more!”

But what offended most representatives of the military environment in “The Duel” was not the author’s ignorance or his general resentment towards the army as such. To please the general oppositional mood prevailing in the editorial office of Znanie, with his preaching of anti-militarism, Kuprin, first of all, shamed all defenders of the Fatherland with their profession. Even the most benevolent reviewers noted: “The Duel” is harmed precisely by the journalistic, in its own way beautiful and even spectacular anger...” (P. M. Pilsky).

Kuprin dealt a cruel blow to those who considered military service to be their true calling, and not an accident, a heavy duty or an absurd mistake. Behind the ardent desire to “expose and castigate,” the author was unable to discern in each of his unsympathetic characters the future defenders of Port Arthur, the true heroes of the First World War, those who stood up to defend their homeland in a completely hopeless situation at the beginning of 1918, created the Volunteer Army and died in her first Kuban campaigns.

Neither before nor after “The Duel” did Kuprin give in his works such a broad picture of the life of a certain environment (in this case, the officers), he never raised such acute social problems that required their solution, and finally, the writer’s skill in depicting the inner world man, his complex, often contradictory psychology did not achieve such expressiveness as in “The Duel.” For Kuprin's contemporaries, the denunciation of the vices of military life was an expression of the general incurable illness of the entire monarchical system, which, it was believed, rested solely on army bayonets.

Many critics called “The Duel” by A.I. Kuprin “a duel with the entire army”, as an instrument of violence against the human person. And if we take it more broadly, then a duel with the entire state system of the modern writer of Russia.

It was precisely this radical formulation of the question that determined the severity of the struggle around the “Duel” between representatives of two public camps - progressive and protective-reactionary.

Only the subsequent tragic events of the beginning of the 20th century clearly showed Kuprin himself and all his contemporaries the complete illegality and untimeliness of such “fights.” Violence always remains violence, no matter how beautiful ideas it is covered up by people in uniform or without them. It was necessary to fight not against orders, not against mechanisms or tools, but against the nature of man himself. Unfortunately, Kuprin and the “progressive public” of that time realized this too late. In “The Duel,” Kuprin also tries to prove that it is not people themselves who are bad, but the conditions in which they are placed, i.e. that environment that gradually kills everything that is best in them, everything that is human.

But 1917 came. What Kuprin’s Romashov once dreamed of happened: the soldiers, incited by the “fighters for the people’s happiness,” said the same thing to the war: “I don’t want to!” But the war did not stop because of this. On the contrary, it took on an even uglier, inhumane, fratricidal form.

“The holiest of titles,” the title of “man,” is disgraced as never before. The Russian people are also disgraced - and what would it be, where would we turn our eyes, if there were no “ice campaigns”! - Ivan Bunin wrote, remembering those very “cursed days.”

Yes, no one, except for a handful of yesterday’s tsarist officers, once exposed in the “Duel” as moral monsters - victims of an inhumane, vicious system - even tried to save Russia from the horrors of Bolshevism. No one except them, the defamed, betrayed, humiliated yesterday's front-line heroes and cadet boys, stood up for the country disgraced by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. No one but them tried to fight to regain the title of man...

After the Civil War, when in Soviet Russia criticism extolled Kuprin’s “Duel” as a “truly revolutionary work” exposing the tsarist army and the rotten through and through, completely decomposed officers, the author himself adhered to a completely different position.

It is characteristic that back in 1907, having carefully read the text of “The Duel” by L.N. Tolstoy, he remarked: “Kuprin has no idea, he is just an officer.” And it was true. In a time of trial, Kuprin - an officer not by position, but in essence - could not renounce his Motherland, remain indifferent to the feat of the Russian officers, who completed their way of the cross in a foreign land.

In our opinion, the novel “Junker”, written by A.I. Kuprin in exile, became a kind of “apology” for “The Duel”. In it, the writer Kuprin, like many emigrant intellectuals who once desperately scolded the tsarist order, with pain in his soul, was nostalgic for his lost youth, for his lost homeland, for the Russia that was and which they all lost.

Analysis of the work

Compositional features of the “Duel”

Kuprin himself and his first critics often called The Duel a “novel.” Indeed, the abundance of characters, several thematic lines, which, intertwined, create a holistic picture of the life of the army environment, allow us to consider this work a novel. But the only one story line, simple and concise, as well as conciseness, limited events in time and space, a relatively small amount of text - all this is more typical of a story or story.

Compositionally, “The Duel” was built by Kuprin according to the principles of his first story “Moloch”. The author's attention is focused primarily on the main character, his emotional experiences, the characteristics of his attitude towards people, on his assessments of the surrounding reality - exactly the same as in “Moloch”, where the engineer Bobrov stood in the center. The factory and workers were the background of "Moloch", the regiment, officers and soldiers represent the background of "Duel".

However, in “The Duel,” Kuprin has already deviated from the principle of a “total” image of the background: instead of the faceless mass of “Moloch” workers, “The Duel” contains a more detailed, more differentiated description of the mass of soldiers and a very expressive gallery of officer portraits. The regiment, officers, soldiers are written in close-up in organic interaction with the main character of the story, Romashov. The reader sees in front of him interspersed realistic paintings, creating a large canvas in which “minor” characters can be as important to the artistic whole as the main images.

Loser Hero

At the center of “The Duel,” as in the center of the story “Moloch,” is the figure of a man who has become, to use Gorky’s words, “sideways” to his social environment.

The reader is immediately struck by the “foreignness” of Romashov, his worthlessness and uselessness to the mechanism of which he is forced to consider himself a part, his incompatibility with the surrounding reality, with the realities of army garrison life. At the same time, Kuprin clearly makes it clear that Romashov is not by chance a student or high school student who ended up in the army, who was just excommunicated from his parents, torn from his family or from some other, more prosperous environment. Romashov initially had a desire to make a military career: he studied at a military school, mastered special knowledge, and even dreamed of entering the academy. And suddenly, faced with what he had been trained for for so many years - namely, real army service - all the plans of the young officer turn out to be untenable. An internal protest against boredom, violence, inhumanity, etc. appears. etc. The entire action of the story, including the complete rebirth of the hero, takes only a few months (from April to June). The development of the image is unnaturally fast, even lightning fast: yesterday everything was fine, but today there is a complete collapse and awareness of one’s own tragic mistake.

The conclusion involuntarily suggests itself that such a hero, in any chosen field, could come to the same disappointment, rejection of the surrounding reality and simply die. What does the army have to do with it?

Kuprin repeatedly emphasizes the internal growth of his hero, which ultimately results in the desire to free himself from military service, as an instrument of violence against his personality. But what is the former “Fendrik” Romashov going to do? Write novels? Rock the already wretched edifice of Russian statehood? Bringing closer the “bright future” that Kuprin’s contemporaries then saw in revolution and the destruction of the old world? This hero does not have any more or less clear program of action.

Soviet critics who analyzed Kuprin’s “Duel” interpreted the image of Romashov in an extremely contradictory manner. Some saw in him a future revolutionary, a fighter for the freedom of the human person. Thus, critic of the magazine “New World” L. Mikhailova, in her review of the three-volume collected works of Kuprin, published by Goslitizdat in the early 1950s, wrote: “If Romashov had worn not the shoulder straps of an infantry second lieutenant, but a green jacket of a student, we would most likely have seen if only he could be seen at a student meeting, among revolutionary youth.”

Others, on the contrary, pointed out the worthlessness and uselessness of such a loser hero, who has no place in a bright tomorrow. The author of one of the dissertations dedicated to A.I. Kuprin, K. Pavlovskaya, noted in her abstract: “... the characterization of Romashov emphasizes the non-viability of such people, the failure of their struggle for personal freedom. Kuprin realized that the Romashovs were no longer needed in life.”

Most likely, Kuprin himself did not know (he could not even imagine) what would happen to his hero when he gained the much-desired freedom. Lieutenant Romashov is like a randomly grown flower in a no man's land between two warring armies. According to all laws, he should not have grown up on the scorched ground plowed up by shells, but he grew up, and the soldier running to attack crushed him with his boot. Will this flower wither or rise again to die in a crater from another explosion? Kuprin didn’t know. The image of Romashov was so out of touch with the overall picture of future socialist realism, which A.M. had already begun to preach in literature. Gorky and K, that the author decided to simply send him into oblivion.

The death of a hero on the eve of rebirth is a completely successful literary device. It occurs precisely at the moment when Romashov made an attempt to rise, breaking out of an environment alien to him, and therefore symbolizes the active hostility of this environment to anyone who in one way or another comes into conflict with it.

Character system of the story

Researchers of Kuprin’s work often denied the author a realistic portrayal of the images of many of the characters in “The Duel,” arguing that he deliberately deprived all the officers - the heroes of the story - of even glimpses of humanity, exposing each of them as a cardboard embodiment of any of the army’s vices: rudeness, cruelty, martinetry, drunkenness, money-grubbing, careerism.

P.N. Berkov, in his book about Kuprin, noted that “despite such a large number of images of officers in The Duel, they are all more or less similar,” in the novel there are many “officers little different from each other.”

At first glance, such a statement may seem not without foundation. In "The Duel" there is only one hero - Romashov. All other characters are built around him, creating a kind of faceless vicious circle, breaking out of which becomes the main task of the main character.

However, if we turn to Kuprin’s work itself, it becomes clear that in reality everything is far from so simple. This is the strength of Kuprin as a realist artist, that, drawing many officers of the same provincial garrison, similar, like “cogs” of a huge mechanism, he tried to depict people endowed with their own, unique, individual traits.

The author does not at all deprive his heroes of humanity. On the contrary, he finds something good in each of them: Colonel Shulgovich, having reprimanded the officer who had wasted public funds, immediately gives him his money. Vetkin is a kind person and a good comrade. Bek-Agamalov is, in fact, a good comrade. Even Sliva, a stupid campaigner who beats soldiers and gets drunk alone, is impeccably honest about the soldiers’ money passing through his hands. The point, therefore, is not that only degenerates and monsters pass before us, although among the characters in “The Duel” there are such, but that even officers endowed with some positive inclinations, in conditions of terrible arbitrariness and lawlessness that prevailed in tsarist army, lose their human appearance. “The environment is stuck” - this is a simple and understandable explanation for all the surrounding evil. And at that moment this explanation suited the absolute majority of Russian society.

Three years before the appearance of “The Duel” A.P. Chekhov, in one of his letters to Kuprin, criticized his story “On Repose,” dedicated to depicting the joyless life in an almshouse of several elderly actors: “Five definitely depicted appearances tire attention and eventually lose their value. Shaved actors look alike, like priests, and remain alike, no matter how carefully you portray them.”

“The Duel” is evidence of how organically Kuprin accepted Chekhov’s criticism. Not five, but more than thirty representatives of the same social environment are depicted in the story, and each of them has its own character, its own special features. It is impossible to confuse the old army servant, the degraded drunkard Captain Sliva, with the dandy lieutenant Bobetinsky, who aspires to aristocracy and imitates the guards’ “golden youth”. You cannot mix up the other two officers - the good-natured, lazy Vetkin and the cruel and predatory Osadchy.

It is characteristic that at the moment of meeting the hero, the writer, as a rule, does not give a detailed description of his appearance. Kuprin’s portrait characteristics are extremely compressed and serve to reveal the main character traits of the person depicted. So, speaking about Shurochka’s husband, Lieutenant Nikolaev, Kuprin notes: “His warlike and kind face with a fluffy mustache turned red, and his large dark ox eyes flashed angrily.” This combination of kindness with belligerence, the ox-like expression of the eyes with an angry gleam, reveals the lack of a strong character, dullness and vindictiveness inherent in Nikolaev.

Some of the portraits in “The Duel” are interesting because they contain the prospect of further development of the image. Drawing the appearance of Osadchy, Kuprin notes: “Romashov always felt in his beautiful gloomy face, the strange pallor of which was even more strongly set off by his black, almost blue hair, something tense, restrained and cruel, something inherent not in a person, but in a huge, strong to the beast. Often, imperceptibly watching him from somewhere from afar, Romashov imagined what this man must be like in anger, and, thinking about this, he turned pale with horror and clenched his cold fingers.” And later, in the picnic scene, the writer shows Osadchy “in anger,” confirming and deepening the impression that this officer evoked in Romashov.

Kuprin’s portraiture is no less convincing when he portrays simple and even primitive people, clear at first glance: the sad captain Leshchenko, the widowed lieutenant Zegrzht with many children, etc.

Even the episodic characters in “The Duel” are wonderfully done. Among them, Lieutenant Mikhin deserves special mention. He, like Romashov and Nazansky, is drawn by the author with sympathy. Kuprin emphasizes and highlights “Romashov’s” features in Mikhin: ordinary appearance, shyness - and along with this moral purity, intolerance and aversion to cynicism, as well as the unexpected physical strength in this nondescript-looking young man (when he defeats the taller Olizar at a picnic) .

It is significant that when Romashov, after a collision with Nikolaev, is summoned to the court of a society of officers, the only one who openly expresses his sympathy for him is Mikhin: “Only one second lieutenant Mikhin shook his hand for a long time and firmly, with wet eyes, but did not say anything, blushed, dressed hastily and awkwardly and left.”

Nazansky

Nazansky occupies a special place among the heroes of “The Duel”. This is the least vital character in the story: he does not participate in the events in any way, he cannot be called the hero of the work at all. The image of a drunken, half-crazed officer was introduced by Kuprin solely to express his cherished thoughts and views. It would seem, why can’t they be put into the mouth of such a wonderful person as Romashov? No! Kuprin follows the established literary tradition of realism: in Russia, either drunks, or holy fools, or “former people” can freely express their opinions. As the saying goes, “what a sober man has in his head, a drunk man has on his tongue.” It is no coincidence that in the works of the same A.M. Gorky, it is tramps, drunkards, “former people” who carry out Nietzschean sermons (for example, Satin in the play “At the Depths”). In this regard, Nazansky successfully complements the image of the sober romantic Romashov. Nazansky exists, as it were, outside of time and space, outside of any social environment that has long ago crushed him and spat him out like unnecessary trash.

It was into the mouth of such a person that Kuprin put his merciless criticism of the army and officers. “No, think about us, the unfortunate Armeuts, about the army infantry, about this main core of the glorious and brave Russian army. After all, it’s all rubbish, rubbish, garbage,” says Nazansky.

Meanwhile, Nazansky’s views are complex and contradictory, just as Kuprin’s own position was contradictory. The pathos of Nazansky’s monologues is, first of all, the glorification of a personality free from shackles, the ability to distinguish true life values. But there is something else in his words. According to Nazansky, the possession of high human qualities is “the lot of the chosen ones,” and this part of the hero’s philosophy is close to Nietzscheanism, which Gorky had not yet suffered from at that time: “... who is dearer and closer to you? Nobody. You are the king of the world, its pride and adornment. You are the god of all living things. Everything you see, hear, feel belongs only to you. Do what you want. Take whatever you like. Do not be afraid of anyone in the entire universe, because there is no one above you and no one is equal to you.”

Today, all the protracted philosophical monologues of this character look rather like a parody, an artificial author’s insertion-remark into the body of a living work. But at that moment, Kuprin himself was fascinated by Nietzscheanism, was influenced by Gorky and believed that they were absolutely necessary in the story.

Society persistently demanded change. Nazansky’s acutely topical monologues were enthusiastically perceived by opposition-minded youth. For example, in the words of Nazansky about the “cheerful two-headed monster” who stands on the street: “Whoever passes by him, it will now hit him in the face, now in the face,” - the most radically minded readers saw a direct call to fight this monster, under which, naturally, meant autocracy.

In the revolutionary days of 1905, Kuprin successfully performed reading excerpts from “The Duel” in a variety of audiences. It is known, for example, that when on October 14, 1905, the writer read Nazansky’s monologue at a student evening in Sevastopol, Lieutenant Schmidt approached him and expressed his admiration. Soon after this, the delighted lieutenant went to Ochakov, where he killed hundreds of people with his adventurous actions.

Defending the right to freedom of an individual person worthy of it, Nazansky speaks with complete disdain about other people: “Who can prove to me with clear conviction how I am connected with this - damn him! - my neighbor, with a vile slave, with an infected person, with an idiot?.. And then, what interest will make me break my head for the happiness of the people of the thirty-second century?

Schmidt and similar “figures” thought exactly the same. As you know, the rebellious lieutenant was not going to die heroically for the happiness of the “vile slaves”: he successfully escaped from the burning cruiser, and was caught only by pure chance. For a long time, this was perceived by society as a high moral feat. An excellent illustration for the sermon of the most “advanced” character in “The Duel”!

However, it cannot be said that Nazansky, this hero-reasoner, hero-mouthpiece, designed to convey a certain idea to the reader, fully expresses the opinion of the author of the story on all the topical issues he raised.

It is especially significant that Romashov, who listens attentively to Nazansky, seems to find in his words answers to important questions for himself, agrees with him, but in fact does not at all follow the advice of his half-crazed friend. And Romashov’s attitude towards the unfortunate, downtrodden soldier Khlebnikov, and even more so his rejection of his own interests in the name of the happiness of his beloved woman, Shurochka Nikolaeva, indicate that the preaching of militant individualism, developed by Nazansky, only excites the consciousness of the hero of the story, without affecting his heart. It is in this, in our opinion, that the contradictions that tormented the author of “The Duel” between the ideas declared by reason and those qualities that were originally inherent in every person by nature were revealed. This is the main merit of Kuprin as a humanist writer: only a person who has called upon all his best human qualities for help, who has abandoned selfish egoism and self-deception, is able to change something, make this world a better place and love it. There is no other way.

Shurochka

The principles preached by Nazansky are fully implemented in the story by Shurochka Nikolaeva, who condemns Romashov, who is in love with her, to certain death in the name of her selfish, selfish goals.

All critics unanimously recognized Shurochka’s image as one of the most successful in “The Duel.” Kuprin, perhaps for the first time in Russian literature, managed to create a generally negative female image, without showing either the author's condemnation or pitiful condescension towards his heroine. Unlike many of his predecessors (L.N. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov), Kuprin does not “explain” anything about this character; he perceives Shurochka as she is, and at the same time endows her with a number of attractive traits. Shurochka is beautiful, smart, charming, in all respects she stands head and shoulders above the other officer ladies of the regiment, but she is calculating, selfish and, unlike Romashov, has a clear, definite goal. True, in his ideas about better life the young woman has not yet gone beyond the dream of the capital, of success in high society etc. But a person who is able to have a dream and act with the most radical methods in the name of its implementation, as a rule, achieves a lot in life.

The portrait of Shurochka is also given in a unique way. Kuprin deliberately evades the author's description of her appearance, leaving it to Romashov himself to draw her as he sees her. From his internal monologue we see not just a detailed portrait, but also the hero’s expressed attitude towards his beloved:

“How boldly she asked: am I good? ABOUT! You are beautiful! Darling! Here I sit and look at you - what happiness! Listen: I will tell you how beautiful you are. Listen. Your face is pale and dark. Passionate face. And there are red burning lips on it - how they should kiss! - and eyes surrounded by a yellowish shadow... When you look straight, the whites of your eyes are slightly blue, and in the large pupils there is a dull, deep blue. You're not a brunette, but there's something gypsy about you. But your hair is so clean and thin and comes together in a knot at the back with such a neat, naive and businesslike expression that you want to quietly touch it with your fingers. You are small, you are light, I would pick you up in my arms like a child. But you are flexible and strong, you have breasts like a girl’s, you are all impetuous and mobile. On your left ear, below, you have a small mole, like a mark from an earring - it’s lovely...”

At first, as if with random touches, and then more and more clearly, Kuprin highlights in the character of this woman such traits as spiritual coldness, callousness, and pragmatism that were initially completely unnoticed by Romashov. For the first time, he catches something alien and hostile to himself in Shurochka’s laughter at the picnic: “There was something instinctively unpleasant in this laughter, which sent a chill into Romashov’s soul.” At the end of the story, in the scene of the last date, the hero experiences a similar, but significantly intensified sensation when Shurochka dictates her terms of the duel: “Romashov felt something secret, smooth, slimy crawling invisibly between them, which sent a cold smell to his soul " This scene is complemented by the description of Shurochka’s last kiss: “her lips were cold and motionless.”

For Shurochka, Romashov’s love is just an annoying misunderstanding. As a means to achieving her cherished goal, this person is completely unpromising. Of course, for the sake of his love, Romashov could pass the exams to the academy, but this would only be a meaningless sacrifice. He would never have fit into the life that so attracted his chosen one, he would never have achieved what was so necessary for her. Nikolaev, on the contrary, from Kuprin’s point of view, had all the qualities necessary for this. He is flexible, diligent, hardworking, and natural stupidity has never prevented anyone from achieving high ranks and gaining a position in society. The reader does not even have any doubt that with a woman like Shurochka, the bumpkin Nikolaev will definitely become a general in twenty years. Only he won’t have to count on a general’s pension after October 1917...

Images of soldiers

The images of soldiers do not occupy such a significant place in the story as the images of officers. They were introduced by Kuprin solely for the purpose of clearly demonstrating the social inequality and class prejudices that reigned in the army.

In the story, only the private of the platoon commanded by Romashov, the sick, downtrodden soldier Khlebnikov, is highlighted in close-up. He appears directly before the reader only in the middle of the story, but already on the first page of “The Duel” Khlebnikov’s surname, accompanied by swear words, is pronounced by his closest superior, Corporal Shapovalenko. This is how the reader’s first, still absentee, acquaintance with the unfortunate soldier takes place.

One of the most exciting scenes of the story is a night meeting near the railway track of two losers, potential suicides - Romashov and Khlebnikov. Here, both the plight of the unfortunate, driven and downtrodden Khlebnikov, and the humanism of Romashov, who sees in the soldier, first of all, a suffering person, just like himself, are revealed with utmost completeness. Romashov, in a fit of philanthropy, calls Khlebnikov “my brother!”, but for Khlebnikov, the officer who condescended to him is a stranger, a master (“I can’t do it anymore, master”). And the humanism of this master, as Kuprin sharply emphasizes, is extremely limited. Romashov’s advice – “you have to endure” – was given by him, rather, to himself than to this desperate man. The author clearly proves that Romashov is unable to change anything in Khlebnikov’s fate, because between him, even the most worthless and low-paid infantry officer and a simple soldier, there is a bottomless abyss. It is absolutely impossible to overcome this gap under these conditions, and at the end of the story Khlebnikov still commits suicide. Romashov does not know what needs to be done so that hundreds of “these gray Khlebnikovs, each of whom is sick with their own grief,” really feel free and breathe a sigh of relief. Nazansky doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know this either. And those who believed that they knew what needed to be done began by killing the gentlemen officers themselves with the hands of these same Khlebnikovs. But did this make the Khlebnikovs happy and free? Unfortunately no.

Heroes and prototypes

Often, readers of “The Duel” ask the question: did the heroes of the famous story have real prototypes among the officers of the regiment in which Kuprin served in the first half of the 90s? Based on the data at their disposal, researchers answer this question in the affirmative.

On next year after the writer left the army in Kamenets-Podolsk, the “Address-calendar of the Podolsk province” was published, which contains a complete list of officers of the 46th Dnieper Infantry Regiment. In the year that had passed since Kuprin left the army, the officer corps of the regiment, which was very stable in those years, could change only slightly.

Kuprin’s fidelity to the facts of the biography of individual officers of the Dnieper Regiment, who served as his prototypes, in some cases is simply amazing. For example, here is what is said in the story about the regimental treasurer Doroshenko:

“The treasurer was Staff Captain Doroshenko - a gloomy and stern man, especially towards the Fendriks. IN Turkish war he was wounded, but in the most inconvenient and dishonorable place - in the heel. Eternal teasing and witticisms about his wound (which, however, he received not in flight, but at the time when, turning to his platoon, he commanded the attack) made it so that, having gone to war as a cheerful ensign, he returned from it bilious and an irritable hypochondriac."

From the service record of Staff Captain Doroshevich, stored in the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RGVIA), it follows that in his youth he participated in the Russian-Turkish War and was wounded during the battle near the village of Mechke in the right leg by two rifle bullets. Having served for many years in the Dnieper Regiment, Doroshevich was the regimental treasurer from 1888 to 1893, and from March 1894, a member of the regimental court. Doroshevich served in the Dnieper Regiment until 1906 and retired as a colonel.

The prototype for the image of the battalion adjutant Olizar was another colleague of Kuprin, adjutant Olifer.

Olizar, along with Archakovsky, Dietz, Osadchiy and Peterson, belongs to the most negative characters in “The Duel.” And his appearance - “long, thin, sleek, pomaded - a young old man, with a naked but wrinkled, whippy face,” and his whole behavior speaks of Kuprin’s sharply hostile attitude towards him. Particularly indicative are the pages of “The Duel,” which depict the adventures of officers in a brothel. Olizar’s actions here are distinguished by extremely frank cynicism. It is characteristic that, describing the return of the officers from the brothel and pointing out that they “acted a lot of outrages,” Kuprin in the first printed edition attributed the most outrageous act to Olizar. Subsequently, while editing the story, the writer removed this episode, obviously afraid of shocking the reader, but the general negative assessment of it remained. That is why, in the picnic scene, Kuprin takes special pleasure in showing how “small, awkward,” but deeply sympathetic to the reader, Mikhin wins a victory over Olizar in a fight.

According to the service record, Olizar’s prototype Nikolai Konstantinovich Olifer, “from the hereditary nobles of the Voronezh province,” served in the Dnieper Regiment from 1889 to 1897, and from the beginning of his service until 1894 he was a battalion adjutant. After the Dnieper Regiment, he served in the border guard and was dismissed in 1901 due to “illness.” From the medical examination report kept in Olifer’s personal file, it is clear that he had syphilis. The illness led him to mental illness in the form of paralytic dementia.

In all likelihood, Kuprin did not know this gloomy end. But even if he did find out, he would hardly be very surprised. “Seventy-five percent of our officer corps are sick with syphilis,” Kuprin reports through the mouth of Nazansky. It is unlikely that venereologists would share such statistics with the writer, but Olifer’s story indirectly illustrates these words.

Kuprin's autobiography, dating back to 1913, tells of his clash with the regiment commander, Alexander Prokofievich Baikovsky. The old colonel is characterized in such a way that one involuntarily recalls Shulgovich, the commander of the regiment in which Romashov serves: .

In the seventh chapter of “The Duel,” after the dressing down caused by Shulgovich, Romashov, like Kuprin, has lunch with his regimental commander, and he establishes that they are fellow countrymen.

Interesting information about Baikovsky was reported by T. Goigova, the daughter of Kuprin’s colleague S. Bek-Buzarov, some of whose features Kuprin used when creating the image of Bek-Agamalov:

“As far as I remember, there was no longer Kuprin, nor Baikovsky in the regiment (I saw him at our house later, when he came, being retired, to Proskurov from Kiev, where he lived at that time), nor the Volzhinskys. But I have a vivid idea of ​​each of them, formed from the stories of my parents. Baikovsky seems to me more like an out-and-out tyrant than a beast. They told how he threw two officers in patent leather boots, who he had just invited into his crew, into a deep puddle filled with liquid mud, only because the officers recklessly said “Merci” and Baikovsky could not stand anything foreign. He had many similar examples of tyranny. At the same time... outside of duty, he showed attention to the officers. I know of a case when he called an officer to his home who had lost at cards and, after scolding him, forced him to take money to pay off his gambling debt.”

The boss and fellow countryman of Second Lieutenant Kuprin, Baikovsky, also turned under the pen of the writer Kuprin into one of the most striking figures in his work.

Despite the fact that the story “The Duel” is entirely a product of its own era, already quite far removed from us, it has not lost its relevance today. With this book, Kuprin, wittingly or unwittingly, predetermined the nature of the depiction of the tsarist army in all subsequent Russian-language literature. Such significant works of the 1900s dedicated to the army as “Retreat” by G. Erastov, “Babaev” by S. Sergeev-Tsensky and a number of others arose under the direct influence of “The Duel”.

In the wake of general social upheavals at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, it has again become fashionable to publicly expose the vices of the Russian state system, and at the same time to criticize the Russian army. It was then that it became clear that it was possible to write honestly about everyday life in the army only in the spirit of “The Duel.” The authors of military themes are Y. Polyakov (“One Hundred Days Before the Order”), V. Chekunov (“Kirza”), V. Primost (“730 Days in Boots”), screenwriter and director of the film “Anchor, more anchor!” P. Todorovsky and many others today raise the same “eternal” problems that were first voiced in the once sensational story by A.I. Kuprin. And again, some critics and readers enthusiastically applaud the bold, accurate characterizations, sharing the kind and not-so-kind humor of the creators of these works; others reproach the authors for being excessively “dirty,” slanderous, and unpatriotic.

However, the majority of today's youth, who can only read the label on a bag of chips, learn about the problems of the modern army not so much from fiction, but from their own bitter experience. What to do about it, and who is to blame - these are eternal Russian questions, the solution of which depends on ourselves.

Elena Shirokova

Materials used:

Afanasyev V.N.. A.I. Kuprin. Critical-biographical essay. - M.: Fiction, 1960.

Berkov P.N. Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin. – Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, M-L., 1956

Druzhnikov Yu. Kuprin in tar and molasses // New Russian word. – New York, 1989. – February 24.