The site of the Chernov/Novosil’tsev duel in September 1825.
At the recent Anglian Bookfair at the Sudbury Arts Centre, I sat on a panel with two other writers of historical fiction. We decided to read passages that showed off the fruits of our research.
I read an extract from my first book, Small Acts of Kindness. It was the description of a duel that took place outside Saint Petersburg in September 1825. The event is well documented in contemporary memoirs, because of its historical connections.
The duel happened after an impoverished guardsman called Konstantin Chernov called out a well-connected toff, Vladimir Novolsil’tsev, who had played fast and loose with his sister, and finally jilted her. The event probably crept into history because Chernov happened to be the cousin of the committed revolutionary, Kondraty Ryleev, who was hanged the following year for his part in the Decembrist Uprising.
The site of the fight, called by one commentator as ‘the most brutal in the 19th Century’, is today marked by the memorial above. On the ground nearby one can see circular slabs, only eight paces apart, where the protagonists turned towards one another and fired. More details of the Chernov/Novosil’tsev duel can be found here: https://reveal.world/en/story/izvestnye-dueli-peterburga-v2-5043/the-duel-that-took-place-in-the-park-of-the-forestry-institute-on-september-24-1
Public meetings of protest were forbidden in Russia at that time (see my discussion of Pushkin’s funeral here: https://jenniferantill.com/controlling-the-corpse-the-autocratic-reaction-to-death/ ). As a result, a funeral was one of the few occasions where it was possible for a large number of people to assemble legally. Ryleev moved quickly to exploit poor Chernov’s death for his own political ends. As I describe in my book:
On the day of Chernov’s funeral at the Smolensky Cemetery, a great throng converged on the burial place of the young officer. A cortege of some two hundred carriages blocked the city streets, while a looping procession of mourners followed the coffin on foot.’ Despite the presence of a number of secret policemen, an enthusiast standing at the graveside read part of a poem by Ryleev that pledged to fight tyranny on behalf of the ‘trembling slaves of the Tsar’.
The outcome of the Chernov/Novosil’tsev duel was unusual in that it resulted in the death of both protagonists. Duelling pistols did not shoot straight until the middle of the nineteenth century, and as a result it has been calculated that, in contrast to fighting with swords, the chance of even being wounded in a pistol duel was only one in four. For both men to receive mortal wounds was therefore extremely unlikely.
I find it quite pleasing that a duel that actually happened turned out to have a more implausible result than the entirely fictitious fight that I describe in my second book, Fortune’s Price.