La singolar tenzone fra corpo proprio e altrui. Con esempi dalla letteratura russa

Dueling between one's own body and the other's. With some examples from Russian literature. Since ancient times, the fight between two contenders has proved to be a major stimulus for the imagination. Literature, a liminal area between the self and the world, a place of ideal amalgamation between distant experiences and cultures, finds in the duel a perfect theme. A theme able to represent social realities and imaginary worlds by choosing in turn distinct points of observation and stylistic keys that range from the tragic to the comic. The awareness of having to face the fatal threshold between this and the other world, represented by the duel, is accompanied by the simulacra of many “others”: first of all, the opponent as another’s own self; then the other material body which is to be fought; finally, the "social other" identifiable in the judgment of the world which makes it impossible to escape the duel. The essay investigates these patterns through textual examples of the Russian literature, from the end of the 18th century to the present time. Observing the emerging visibility of women and the historical disappearance of the duel, the essay underlines the relation between the role of women, the awareness of one's own body, and the study of the combat of honor in dialogue with the construction of gendered identities.