duelling & slappinh

the following is a short article taken from
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200009/ai_n8908732/?tag=content;col1
that i thought brought some illumination to the dueling question. i would
be interested to find a copy of the book.

Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature
Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep 2000 by Paul Robinson


Irina Reyfman. Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian
Culture and Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. xi,
364 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $49.50, cloth.

The duel and its underlying codes of honour are the object of continuing
fascination. In Ritualized Violence Russian Style, Irina Reyfman provides
the first comprehensive history of the duel in Russia, and gives her own
interpretations of why dueling became so popular especially in the
nineteenth century.

The book consists of two parts. The first is a historical overview that
discusses the Russian interpretation of honour in the Imperial era, the
initial reluctance to adopt dueling (which, along with the honour code, is
portrayed as an entirely Western transplant) and its eventual acceptance.
Reyfman provides an exhaustive list of duels, but, as she comments, the
details of many of these duels are unclear and it is impossible for any
purely historical account to be complete. The second part of the book
compensates for this with an analysis of dueling in Russian literature,
especially in the works of Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Fedor
Dostoevsky. One minor fault with the book is that some terms, such as
bretteur and point d'honneur, are not defined the first time that they are
introduced. Thus, if readers do not already understand the various nuances
of meaning associated with them, they may have trouble following the text
until the meaning of the terms becomes clear subsequently.

Historians who have analysed dueling in European countries have tended to
portray it as a reactionary social phenomenon, designed to reinforce the
dominance of the ruling aristocracy at a time when its social position was
under threat. Reyfman's interpretation is rather different. In her eyes
the duel's popularity in Russia was a result of its ability to protect an
individual's physical inviolability and to act as a protector of
individual rights in a society with inadequate legal safeguards. At one
point she goes so far as to call the honour code "a bill of rights." The
duel owed its rise in Russia, Reyfman claims, to the persistence of
Muscovite traditions of corporal punishment. Senior officials were prone
to slap, punch and beat their subordinates. In pre-Petrine times, such
physical abuse was not interpreted as dishonouring. But under the
influence of Western thinking, Russian nobles began to object more
strongly to this treatment and to guard themselves against it. The duel
was the system of protection that they adopted. Superiors who physically
abused their subordinates would now find themselves being challenged to a
duel, and so were deterred. At the same time a slap became interpreted as
a demand to be challenged. Since duels can only be fought between social
equals, the slapper thereby recognised the person he slapped as an equal.
The slap, once seen as the most humiliating of acts, lost its ability to
humiliate