Death and Mutilation at the Dueling Site: Pushkin's Death as a National Spectacle

Early Russian fictional dueling accounts are not guilty of "the lust of the eyes" that St. Augustine repeatedly condemns in the pages of his Confessions: they consistently avoid describing the bodily damage that dueling inflicts. The reader does not witness the physical suffering of the wounded or dying duelist. The protagonist in Mikhail Sushkov's epistolary novella The Russian Werther (written in the early 1790s, first published in 1801) briefly informs his correspondent about the death of his dueling opponent: "He was felled by my hand."' The narrator of the story about dueling interpolated into the 1802 anonymous travelogue A New Sentimental Traveler is equally reticent: "An ill-fated shot! Berngeim is no more!"2 The narrator is only a little less abstract in his description of the death of Berngeim's daughter, Amalia, that immediately follows: "Amalia runs in frenzy, her knees give way, and, hardly having reached the body of her parent, she falls on him, and her soul and spirit unite with him."3 In contrast, the author of A Ntew Sentimental Travelerdevotes considerable attention to the psychological consequences of the incident for Franz, the victorious duelist. He describes in detail the torments that seize Franz immediately after the duel: "Despair, frenzy, love-all passions produced the most powerful effect on his feelings. He dashed and rushed