ABSTRACT
The Duel fortuitously addressed the two great issues of the day. Aleksandr Kuprin had begun work on the novel in 1902, before either war or revolution, and it was as much a literary reworking of his own, obviously unhappy, military experience as a social expose. General Petr Kuprin had served as a junior officer in just such a provincial garrison as that in which The Duel was set, and his familiarity with military life lent force to his characterizations of the tsarist officer corps. The similarity of the social customs and duty behavior that Kuprin and Krasnov described is remarkable, if only because the two groups of officers were in other respects quite different: Kuprin's world was the humble line infantry, Krasnov's the socially exclusive guards' cavalry. As the accounts of tsarist officer life in The Duel and Double Eagle imply, drunkenness was widespread and heavy drinking the norm.
