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Showing posts with the label Graham Greene

Russian Roulette

Of all the diverting entertainments that firearms have to offer, perhaps the most notorious is Russian roulette.  There’s not much to the rules.  All you need is a pistol that holds six bullets.  You put a bullet in one of the chambers, and everyone takes turns holding the gun to their heads until it goes off.  It’s quite a game, and it forces one to ask the question: why on earth would anyone play it?  And who came up with this, anyway? The first record of this game (and I’m using the term loosely) dates to Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novella The Fatalist.  In it, the game involves a gun with five live rounds and one empty chamber, and it’s played alone.  (The character who “plays” puts the gun to his head, pulls the trigger, and survives.)  In this story, this isn’t called Russian roulette.  It’s not called anything at all, though it does appear in a Russian novella. The term Russian roulette was coined almost a century later, in 1937, by Swiss-born writer Georges Surdez, in a short sto