On 28 June 2025, the main Hermitage exhibition of the season—“To your places! Single Combat and Duels from Achilles to Serge Lifar” – begins its run in the Nicholas Hall, It tells in an encyclopaedic manner about the genesis, development and decline of duels of honour, famous participants and their tragedies, the attributes, traditions and rules, causes and occasions of such combats from Classical Antiquity to the mid-20th century.
“This is a fascinating account of an important principle in politics and culture that runs through the centuries. The daring, skill and sacrifice of two people decide the fate of many. Gradually, the range of ‘fates’ was reduced but the keen sense of responsibility for one’s words and deeds remained. Even ‘non-destructive’ types of duel proceed from a symbolic sense of a person’s preparedness for self-sacrifice. The principles of ‘single combat’ as a solution to a problem can be seen in many events across the ages. The duel is an extreme manifestation of the idea of someone’s personal answerability, even if it takes place on a theatrical stage. Fanous duels are a splendid reference point in the history of world and ideological conflicts to this day,” Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented.
The exhibition offers a distinctive view of the history of European civilization. The monomachies of rulers and military commanders in the distant past decided the fates of ancient peoples. The mediaeval tradition is known for judicial “trial by combat” and knightly tournaments. The Renaissance gave humanity duels as we think of them today. Over the following four centuries, some of the most worthy representatives of their communities would “approach the barrier”: aristocrats, military officers, figures from the theatrical world, writers and artists, Seeking to defend their honour, they quite often paid for that determination with their lives.The exhibition has been organized by the State Hermitage with the participation of the Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineer and Signal Corps of the Ministry of Defence of the RF, the Margarita Rudomino All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature, the All-Russian Pushkin Museum, the Moscow Kremlin State Historical and Cultural Museum-Preserve, the Tsarskoye Selo State Museum-Preserve, the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), the State Library of Russia, the National Library of Russia and the Peter the Great Central Naval Museum.
The curator of the exhibition is Nadezhda Rostislavovna Biskup, a researcher in the “Arsenal” Department. The exhibition’s scholarly consultant is leading researcher Victor Mikhailovich Faibisovich.The State Hermitage Publishing House will be producing a scholarly illustrated catalogue of the exhibition.
The exhibition “To your places! Single Combat and Duels from Achilles to Serge Lifar” can be visited by holders of entrance tickets to the Main Museum Complex until 2 November 2025.
More about the exhibition
The space in the Winter Palace’s largest hall is notionally divided into two parts — “Europe” and “Russia”. The display opens with the ancient monomachies (from the Greek μονομαχία – “single combat”) that were the culmination of battles both in epic poetry and in real-life archaic warfare: the clashes between Achilles and Hector, the Horatii and the Curiatii, gladiatorial fights. This section presents weapons, helmets, breastplates and painted vases that tell the story of famous monomachies.
The history of armed one-on-one contests in Europe goes back to the 13th century. It was then that the knightly tournaments appeared that forged a peculiar code of honour — the concept of noble single combat between equals in accordance with definite rules. In the late Middle Ages, a tradition of one-on-one fights within a battle also became established: like the heroes of Antiquity, noble knights would seek out a particular opponent among the mass of the enemy, so as to engage him in honest combat and prove their valour.
The birthplace of the duel is considered to be the Kingdom of Naples. A huge number of warriors found themselves redundant at the end of the series of Italian Wars (1494–1559) and they carried over into civil life the custom of using weapons to settle arguments. Soon everyone was fighting, from university students and commoner professional soldiers to noblemen and the bearers of lofty titles. In the second half of the 16th and 17th centuries, duelling fever gripped France, where in the 20-year reign of Henry IV (1589–1610) alone between 8,000 and 16,000 nobles perished in duels.
Much attention is paid in the exhibition to the history of fencing. The first treatises on the subject appeared in late mediaeval Germany, while in the 16th century gymnastics, anatomy and geometry gave birth to the Italian and Spanish schools of fencing. The evolution of the fencing tradition was accompanied by the improvement of arms and protection: heavy short swords first gave way to elegant rapiers with a fully enclosed guard that reliably protected the hand, while the symbol of the “Gallant Age” would already be the short, lightweight smallsword that permitted highly precise, lightning-fast thrusts.
The first pistols made their appearance in the 16th century and for a long time they remained exclusive to horsemen. In the following century, pistols did find employment in duels: officers accustomed to cavalry engagements often preferred to resolve matters of honour on horseback too. In the 1770s English weaponsmiths began producing duelling sets —a matched pair of pistols housed with accessories in a special case. The use of such pistols served as a guarantee of equal opportunities for both participants in a duel. Until the 1820s, the pistols were fitted with flintlocks. Later those were replaced with the more reliable percussion cap mechanism. Duelling sets were being made right up to the start of the First World War. The best craftsmen strove after not only technical, but also aesthetic perfection in their products. Among them we can find some genuine masterpieces of weaponry art.
The duel arrived in Russia two hundred years before Pushkin’s fateful encounter with D’Anthès. The first single combat that we know about took place on 6 June 1637. For a long time such face-offs would remain confined to foreign mercenaries. The first “Russian” duel had to wait until the spring of 1753. The Charter to the Nobility of 1785 that secured the privileges of that exalted class led to an upsurge in the number of single combats in Russia: along with the acquisition of feudal rights, the noble estate became imbued with an awareness of its chivalrous honour, and the duelling tradition, which was still taking shape, erupted into a real epidemic.
The occasions for challenging someone to a duel in the Russian Empire were very varied. People “threw down the gauntlet” over work conflicts, ethnic and political differences, over beautiful women, over a portion of ice-cream… The memories of the amusing incidents and high dramas of those contests are preserved by duelling sets, portrait paintings and graphic art presented in the exhibition.
A separate section of the display is devoted to a national tragedy —the death in duels of the great Russian poets Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. On show for the first time at this exhibition is a set of documents relating to the “biography” of the duelling set made by the Baucheron‑Pirmet partnership that was purchased in 1842 by Vasily Okhotnikov (1814–1888). Its owner was firmly convinced that these were the very pistols that Pushkin and D’Anthès had used. Those weapons are now kept in the All-Russian Pushkin Museum. The exhibition features a similar pair of pistols made by the same firm from the collection of the Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineer and Signal Corps. Visitors will also see a drawing depicting duellists from the exercise-book of the officer cadet Mikhail Lermontov.
The exhibition in the Nicholas Hall tells of one more duel involving famous Russian poets – Nikolai Gumilev and Maximilian Voloshin. It was only by a stroke of luck that no blood was shed during that encounter, in which people at the time were inclined to detect elements of vaudeville.
By the mid-19th century, with the rise of romantic knightly ideals, a special kind of non-fatal duel gained popularity in student corporations, becoming known by the German term Mensur. Its rules called for the opponents to stand firmly in one spot, moving only their hand and arms. They were not allowed to flinch or dodge a thrust, only to parry it with their own weapon. An encounter continued until the first blood was shed, after which, provided they had displayed proper valour, both participants were acknowledged worthy of celebration. The scars received in such duels were a source of pride, and the two opponents quite often went on to become bosom friends.
Through students of German origin, the Mensur (also known as academic fencing) rapidly spread to the Russian Empire’s Baltic provinces. The general public will have a first opportunity to see a unique protective costume for a Mensur duel from the stocks of the Hermitage, which was used in one of the Baltic student corporations in 1912–13, where it participated in at least seven encounters.
The display concludes with what was most probably the last duel with a Russian participant. On 30 March 1958, in Normandy, before the lenses of numerous movie cameras, two outstanding figures from the ballet world faced each other armed with swords over their creative differences – the prominent impresario 73-year-old Marquis George de Cuevas and the celebrated choreographer Serge Lifar, who was 54 at the time. Seven minutes in, Cuevas cut Lifar on the forearm. The duel was halted and the opponents shook hands. The English-speaking press described that encounter as “a performance”.
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