Dear List,
While roaming through airport book-stores in Rio
de Janeiro I came across a book with an enticing cover carrying the title
,"Mestre de Armas": Six Dueling Stories. It depicted a dying Pierrot and a
retiring Harlequin holding another broken cointender : Suite d' un bal
masqué,1857, by Gerôkme J. León. After
hearing the boarding-call I snatched the unexamined copy and
discovered, to my delight, that one of the stories was authored by
Nabokov. It was not rendered directly from the Russian but from Dmitri's
own 1995 translation of VN's 1927 "Podlets" with the title: "An Affair
of Honor." ( found in a Berlin diary and set down in Russian.)
I remember someone in our List asking about duels in
Nabokov, perhaps these stories are not very difficult to come by in
English.
The anthologist, Cláudio Figueiredo, subtly led us
to understand a little more about the last short-story, Nabokov's. Figueiredo's very informative preface indirectly
contrasted smart sturdy Sainte-Beuve, ready to fight a duel with a pistol
in one hand and an umbrella in the other, to VN's equally pudgy
but fumbling Anton Petróvitch, perhaps intentionally guiding the
readers from the Liérmontov, Tchekov and
Turgueniev heroes, into VN's own Petróvitch.
In his introduction Figueiredo we learn more
about VN's father's planned duel against Alexis Suvórin (Tchekhov's
editor friend and intricate links with ), VN's words in SM and
about dueling mores and practices in different countries. He writes
about Voltaire's received slight, Stendhal's hurt foot, Flaubert's and
Maupassant's opinions about such
practices, dueling statistics, the fight bt. Turgeniev and
Tolstoy.
I also found data about Mikahil Liérmontov's eery
description of his own future death in 1841, presented through his creature
Gruchnitski in "A Hero of our Times", and before
that, Pushkin's dramatic death in 1837. Dueling deaths were
not as common as I initially surmised! One can feel, in
VN's story ( who, in "Armoles" observed that no Russian writer of medium
fame could keep from describing one or more duels in their novels), hints of his
equally pathetic and derelict characters - as those in Despair and
Camera Oscura- inserted in a subtle description of expatriate life
with its particular kind of mixture of characters from distinct social
backgrounds, culture and fortunes and their unheroic "suspended
destinies".
The six selected short-stories were: The
Duel, by Joseph Conrad; The Witness, by Arthur Schnitzler; A Coward, by Guy de
Maupassant ; The Duel, by Heinrich von Kleist; the Duelist by Ivan Turguêniev
and A Matter of Honor, by V. Nabokov.