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The Duel Alexander Kuprin 9780451500458 Books

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The Duel Alexander Kuprin 9780451500458 Books

I found this book slow-going. The protagonist is a completely unsympathetic character: he is shallow, self-absorbed, and a whiner. He talks of love, incessantly, without any apparent understanding of what love might be. The end of the story, which could not come too soon, was predictable.


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The Duel Alexander Kuprin 9780451500458 Books Reviews

This was a tough read for me, taking me several weeks to read as I would easily put it down and ended up making myself read something from it every day to complete it. It's not that I didn't receive any enjoyment from the story but rather that I couldn't connect with it on any level. For the most part it is the story of a young love-sick soldier in the Russian Tsarist Army. He visits and pines for a married woman who strings him along and his overdramatic moonings and swoonings are so over the top my eyes hurt from rolling so much. Secondary to this is the description of how tough, miserable and unfeeling life in the army was for both the soldiers and the officers, though mostly the soldiers at the hands of the officers. Our main character is an officer and though he is careless and prideful he isn't mean and sees the cruelty that goes on often trying to stop verbal and physical assaults in an unobtrusive way. The author really was in the army himself and we can see this as a reflection of what it may have actually been like to be in the Tsar's Army, and while it was terrible indeed it didn't strike me as any different than stories of other late 19th century army life. I enjoyed the army story much, much more than the "love" story. The ending though I found quite chilling in realizing that this was a book written in the year of the first Russian Revolution. One character suddenly starts waxing eloquently for several pages on how a glorious change is about to come and like a madman he describes what to him is a Utopia. To me, it was very chilling indeed, frighteningly so, as he describes how men will become "individualistic", "gods unto themselves", living in peace and me knowing in hindsight the utter slaughter and unequalled killings of their own people Communism brought to Russia. This "speech" totally turned my stomach but from an historical perspective is certainly an eye-opener!
`The Duel` (1905) is Russian author Aleksandr Kuprin's realist masterpiece, wining him literary fame and friendship with Anton Chekov, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Nobel Prize-winning Ivan Bunin and Leo Tolstoy. Kuprin was a born storyteller and has been compared with Kipling and Jack London. Like London, however, Kuprin "degenerated" later in life with the vices of women (prostitutes) and drink and his works similarly became sensational, like with the lurid account of prostitutes in `The Pit` (1915). But he reached a pinnacle of high art with `The Duel`.

`The Duel` explores "honor" in its many permutations. Honor in career, love, and the hypocrisy inherit. The main character, Romashov, is a 21 year old military officer in training in a backwater provincial town where everyone knows everyone and gossip spreads quickly. Kuprin's realistic portrayal of the horrors of Russian military life is a wonderfully rich portrait of an "odious and wanton liaison [of] gambling, drinking, soul-killing, monotonous regimental routine, with never a single inspiring word, never a ray of light in the black, hopeless darkness."

Romashov experiences a number of setbacks in his career and his romantic notions of being a hero to the Czar are shattered by cruel realities - on the brink of suicide (a common occurrence in his regiment) he undergoes a change when he discovers salvation through empathizing with the sufferings of others "it was clear to [Romashov] at once how petty and insignificant was his own sorrow in comparison with [his friends] cruel fate." By rising above soul-crushing military doctrine of honor and violence, and finding instead sympathy with others, he finds freedom, "a proud, triumphant feeling of malicious joy and defiance."

To this end Romashov then discovers that most professions are based on "mistrust of the honor and morality of mankind.. supervisors and official, policemen, book-keepers, priests, etc.." and there are only two careers that are truly noble, science/art. and manual labor. Thus Romashov navigates his way through the world of honor in the sphere of his career, but he has a fatal flaw and that is love. In the end he is tricked by honor in love (or lack thereof) and it is his undoing. Kuprin was not entirely happy with the novels ending, and I tend to agree that its sensationalism mires it in the 19th century. It could have been a modernist novel had Romashov's duel ended in a different way, such as the alternative path suggested by his friend Nasanski. However it is still dramatic and satisfying.
Kuprin's The Duel is a wonderful piece of novel detailing the useless aspects of a military career. A very young Russian officer, Lieutenant Romashov, details his life in the misery of drunk officers, fights, presumptuous military staff, visits to the brothel and such.

The ending was superb.

Also recommended

Shurochka (1983) by Director Iosif Kheifits

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati

Giacomo Casanova’s The Duel

Anton Chekhov’s The Duel

Joseph Conrad’s The Duel

Heinrich von Kleist’s The Duel

Aleksander Pushkin's The Duel (AKA The Pistol, The Shooter)

Aleksander Kuprin’s The Duel

Mark Twain's How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel

Jorge Luis Borges' The Duel

O. Henry's The Duel

Guy de Maupassant's A Duel

Nikolai Teleshov's The Duel

Vladimir Nabokov's The Duel (AKA An Affair of Honor)

Charles Dickens's The Great Winglebury Duel

Touché The Duel in Literature by John Leigh
I found this book slow-going. The protagonist is a completely unsympathetic character he is shallow, self-absorbed, and a whiner. He talks of love, incessantly, without any apparent understanding of what love might be. The end of the story, which could not come too soon, was predictable.