El duelo

The novel is situated between the decline of the great Russian realist novel and the rise of the avant-garde trends that would come to define the modernist era on the eve of the Russian Revolution. The Duel is a love letter to 19th-century Russian literature, simultaneously quoting and imitating the major literary stylistic achievements that preceded it and marking the beginning of a new period, when the ideological battles of the past, represented in the novel by a real duel, have already been fought.