“Why is it that our nation above all others embraced the duel so wholeheartedly?” he asked the stairwell rhetorically. Some, no doubt, would simply dismiss it as a by-product of barbarism. Given Russia’s long, heartless winters, its familiarity with famine, its rough sense of justice, and so on, and so on, it was perfectly natural for its gentry to adopt an act of definitive violence as the means of resolving disputes.
