The Duel

Samoylenko is a mediating figure between the novella’s two polar character portraits, Von Koren and Laevsky. As an army doctor, Samoylenko is conditioned to serve others as well as to obey hierarchical power structures, which results in his ill treatment of inferiors alongside his solicitous kindness to equals and particularly superiors, including the “young generation” he sees exemplified in Von Koren and Pobyedov. Samoylenko extends his service to others outside the sphere of medicine, involving himself in others’ affairs and making his home a hotel of sorts. Although Samoylenko is the first contrast to Laevsky, he is not the most important contrast, and his altruism is brought into question by his lack of critical judgment and his unquestioned traditional values.

Samoylenko’s lack of critical capacity, which both Von Koren and Laevsky possess, is made plain in the scene that prompts the duel, when Laevsky calls Samoylenko a “spy” in the sense of peering too much into his character, and Samoylenko takes this to mean “spy” as a person acting against his government. Samoylenko is a product of his intensely hierarchical society, committed to service in the same way he is committed to the status quo.

Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s trajectory closely parallels Laevsky’s. Like him, she experiences alternations of guilt and disgust at her lover and has shirked her dreams of “work” for a fantasy. She suffers from the same split consciousness, symbolized in her case by alternations between lightness and heaviness. In her efforts to turn the attentions of men and her delusion that “there was only one young, pretty, intellectual woman, and that was herself” (84), she seeks to maintain a sense of lightness even as the crisis begins to unfold: “she seems to herself, little, simple, light, ethereal as a butterfly” (108). The lightness indicates the extent to which Nadyezhda Fyodorovna cannot quite see herself as just an ordinary person among other ordinary people, as though she has no body at all. Doing so is coming to terms with one’s actions and one’s humanity; this is something Laevsky also cannot yet do.

The heaviness that is traded for lightness comes dramatically into Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s sensibility when she is condemned for her behavior. In her case, heaviness is not only the reality of her limited human body and her limited human self; it is also the limitations that she bears as a woman in a society that grants her very few rights. Thus, the image of the fly in an inkwell—linked elsewhere to Samoylenko’s observations of the insect victims of predatory spiders—occurs to her as several men make their demands. Although it is she who is sinking in this well, she understands herself as a stain on the other man in her life, Laevsky. Her sin is his sin. She transforms, like Laevsky, into a repentant sinner.

Von Koren is a caricature of a social type. He represents the natural scientist whose life philosophy is positivist materialism, meaning that all existence is materially grounded. For such a man as Von Koren, ideas such as love and the soul actually stem from chemical reactions, and all knowledge can be brought to light with empirical investigation and scientific experimentation. In 19th-century Russian culture, this type is associated with the middle class, or non-gentry intellectuals often coming from the priest class, whose influence began to assert itself in the cultural sphere in the mid-century.

From the perspective of gentry liberals, Von Koren’s type is associated with a certain kind of radical politics, sometimes called nihilism—a label that has its roots in Turgenev’s 1861 novel Fathers and Children. Von Koren’s politics are informed primarily by his belief in Social Darwinism, which is discernible in his references to social progress by means of the survival of the fittest. This specific view is distinct within a general progressivism according to which the progress of society as a whole is more important, or at least equally as important, as that of the individual. It was a matter of debate whether the general good comes at the cost of individual welfare. In Von Koren’s philosophy, it seems to do just that. Von Koren is not able to balance the needs of the whole and the part. In this way Laevsky is correct when he calls Von Koren a despot, meaning that Von Koren values coercion, presumably for the sake of his ideal society but possibly merely for its own sake.

In addition to Von Koren’s social and political position, this character values work, which Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna will have to learn to do. In this way he represents positive aspects even within his faults. “Work” for Von Koren is largely restricted to observation of the natural world and the production of knowledge on that basis. However reductive this approach might often be, coming to terms with the organic world is a key insight for Laevsky.

Von Koren extends his zoological observation to human beings, eventually embarking on an ethnographical and scientific expedition that combines both endeavors. Von Koren repeatedly justifies murder, which sets him up to both propose a duel and to fire a direct shot. Although it is not clear that he has changed his beliefs by the end of the novella, he has come to recognize the transformation that has taken place in Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. The faults of Von Koren’s worldview are made plain throughout the novella, but he is, in the end, the only critically active moral force among the characters. He is the primary reason that Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna have been able to make their conversion.