"...The next day, at the appointed time, I am with / mine.? already behind the ricks, waiting for my opponent. Soon he came, too. "We may be caught," he said to me. We'll take off our uniforms, put on our doublets, and draw our swords." A. S. Pushkin "The Captain's Daughter" The duel between Shvabrin and Grinev is a familiar scene from school. The duel between two officers, one of whom stood up for the honor of a woman, is a common plot move in Russian literature. Suffice it to recall Lermontov Pechorin, Kuprinsky Romashov... And who among the modern officers at least once in their lives did not get into such life circumstances when the thought of a duel would flash by. This has happened to me before. That is why the idea arose: if we assume that behind the thrown glove lies not "farce, excessive arrogance and outrageous arrogance", as the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, criticizing the duel, but a person's desire to preserve his good name, reputation, authority, in other words, honor and dignity, then talk about a duel as a social and moral mechanism for protecting the honor of the individual, it will seem no less topical than a century and a half ago. Moreover, today's practice shows that there is no effective mechanism for protecting the personal honor of an officer in the modern Russian army yet. In the dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, I found the following definition of a duel: "A duel or duel is an agreed fight between two persons with deadly weapons, according to the rules established for the given case or sanctified by tradition, usually with the purpose of washing offended honor." The word "duel" comes from the Latin "duellum", which means "war" or the Spanish "duello" - "suffering". Numerous studies of this phenomenon in the past convincingly prove that dueling historically arose against the background of private wars, when disputes between opponents were resolved in hand-to-hand combat or an armed duel. The ancient world did not know d ... Read more