43 pages • 1 hour read
Anton ChekhovThe Duel
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1891A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Individualism Versus the Common Good
Compared to many popular narratives, Chekhov’s prose can be disorienting. One expects a story but gets philosophy. In The Duel, the main philosophical debate is between selfish individualism versus the supposed “common good.” This debate is embodied in the ideas and behavior of Laevsky and Von Koren, whose interpersonal conflict is rooted in their opposing values.
Laevsky represents the extremes of individualism for much of the novella, as he is preoccupied almost exclusively with his own wants and desires at the expense of other people—most importantly, at the expense of Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, who will be left socially and legally vulnerable if he abandons her. Laevsky frequently resorts to excuses and self-pity when faced with ethical dilemmas, as when he seeks to find ways of abandoning Nadyezhda Fyodorovna even if it involves deception, or tries to evade informing her of the news of her husband’s death for fear she will expect him to marry her. His ego and self-delusion are also displayed in the way he fantasizes about the greatness he could supposedly achieve if only circumstances were more favorable to him, as when he daydreams about how “He was perhaps very clever, talented, remarkably honest [...] he might have become an excellent Zemstvo leader, a statesman, an orator, a political writer, a saint” (52). In fantasizing about himself in these grandiose terms, Laesvky reveals the extent of his harmful egotism.
Laesvky eventually abandons his excessive individualism toward the end of the novella. Laevsky’s moment of revelation the night before the duel, when he admits to himself that “All his life he had planted not one tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass [...] he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and lie, lie” (229), is the climax of his character arc because it is when he finally recognizes how his excessive individualism has harmed others and led him into a way of life in which he is destructive instead of constructive. His selfishness has led him to “destroy and ruin” instead of accepting the more mature and symbiotic give-and-take required of true human connection. This realization—and his subsequent reconciliation with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna—enables Laevsky to embrace his responsibilities toward others and leads him into a more demanding, but also more fulfilling, way of life.
While Laevsky represents the dangers of excessive individualism, Von Koren represents the opposite extreme: an excessive and brutal loyalty to the idea of the “common good.” Although he claims to care deeply for humanity as a whole, Von Koren is unsettlingly cold, calculating, and even violent in his pursuit of this supposed “common good” in his dealings with others. Early in the novella, Von Koren argues with Samoylenko over dinner that people like Laevsky are useless to society as a whole, thereby making them superfluous and worthy only of eradication: “In the interests of humanity and in their own interests, such people ought to be destroyed” (78). His comment to Samoylenko foreshadows the duel he will participate in toward the end of the novella, which will be a literal murder attempt against Laevsky. In attempting to kill Laesvky during the duel, Von Koren takes his beliefs to their logical extreme by attempting to put his words into practice.
However, like Laesvky, Von Koren also ends the novella with more insight and moderation in his behavior and beliefs than he had at the beginning. While Laevsky learns to moderate his individualistic tendencies for the sake of caring more for others, Von Koren realizes that his dogmatic and brutal adherence to the “common good” has come dangerously close to denying the value of individual human lives. His visit to Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna at the novella’s end, in which he admits, “nobody knows the real truth” (270), reveals that he, too, has learned to look at the world with more nuance and compassion than he previously had, jettisoning his prior radical (and rigid) ideas in favor of more humility and ambivalence. In this way, Chekhov depicts both ideological extremes as dangerously flawed, ultimately advocating for a more moderate—and humane—approach to living and human relationships.
The Impossibility of True Originality
One cannot speak of The Duel without acknowledging the references to other writers that constitute its plot, characters and even its title. Conscious of its own borrowing from a well-worn tradition of dueling plots, and knowingly building itself on well-known novels like Anna Karenina, The Duel stages its foundational ethical inquiry through the theme of writing itself. While the characters’ minds are full of ideas that were simply popular, widely circulated, or part of a long tradition of human thought, the novella itself is similarly second-hand. But Chekhov’s point is that every creative act is situated in its living history. To consider oneself original is to commit Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s same mistake—namely, their delusion that they ought to be superior to others and in this way absolutely unique. Such superiority can never be manifest in actual life, and so is always explained by Laevsky in particular as a result of circumstances: “One could only there—not here—be honest, intelligent, lofty and pure” (48).
The same applies to writing. To be original is not to come from nothing nor fail to acknowledge the embedded contexts in which one works and from which one builds one’s own ideas. Thus, Chekhov draws openly on the adultery plot and even the finer psychological insights of Anna Karenina, the ideological battles of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the Romantic plots of Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Pushkin, and the satirical humor of Nikolai Gogol.
Linked to the theme of literary self-reference is the theme of work, which is voiced by Von Koren but applies to the novella itself in its quest to understand human nature, just as Von Koren does. Von Koren gives in to self-admiration, gazing at himself in the mirror, just as even Pobyedov imagines the fame he would attain from taking an expedition. Chekhov himself went on an expedition to Sakhalin in the summer of 1890, later publishing a travelogue detailing his extensive notes during the trip (Sakhalin Island). Writers risk delusions of grandeur, but this is shown to be a very human foible. Ironic toward himself, Chekhov nevertheless sets to work to let the literary past rush through him and, in the process, introduce his own unique distance from it precisely in showing the rush happen—in the same manner his characters come to their own sense of originality by gaining some perspective on themselves.
The Vulnerability of Women in Society
A major ethical theme in the novel is the way in which women become vulnerable through a lack of social and legal protections. Earlier in the 19th century, romance had become a metaphor for social action: The way a man behaves toward a woman indicates the way he behaves toward society. Female writers of the time, like Evgenia Tur, would also write of the intensive restrictions put upon women. Romance, in particular, often centered upon male characters who were sexually liberal, searching for their ‘freedom’ in the context of pleasure-seeking, regardless of the consequences.
Viewed by society as an object of pleasure, the status of women was a major question for writers because they saw in it the question of desire and restraint. Leo Tolstoy, in particular, was preoccupied with the status of women, and his moral treatises and philosophies of the 1890s influenced Chekhov’s novella. Although women are intensely objectified in 19th-century Russian society, which means their own subjective agency is often almost entirely denied, they are also considered at least human enough to feel pain. In other words, one cannot simply acquire pleasure from them, as men were taught to do, and subsequently cast them off.
The internal struggle of Nadyezhda Fyodorovna testifies to her limited freedom, as well as her limited sense of self. Freedom is what she seeks, but she does so always through the means of male attention, which is of course what in fact keeps her sunk in the inkwell like a fly, to use her own imagery. It is also significant that even a fellow woman—Marya Konstantinovna—lays the blame for Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s predicament solely upon her shoulders, reflecting the harsh double standards of their society. Making herself into a mark of sin, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna rehearses the circular logic of self-blaming so as to cover up society’s structural ethical dilemma, which Chekhov only broaches.
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