In the resort he passes the time with an idle hospitable doctor, studies the guests and decides that one of them, Layevsky, is a decadent and irresponsible Petersburg type whom Nature will reject as unfit to survive. If the Layevskys of this world are not disposed of they will corrupt and destroy civilization. They are vain, they are loose in their morals, they corrupt women, they are irresponsible and idle. The mere sight of Layevsky wandering about the town in his slippers, playing cards all night and talking about himself and his ideals, condemns him in Von Koren’s eyes.
And indeed, in one of the most original ironical opening scenes Chekhov ever wrote, we see Layevsky at his most lamentable. He and the amiable doctor—one of Chekhov’s skeptics who are ashamed of their good nature—have gone to the beach to take a morning dip and are up to their shoulders in water. The secretive Layevsky has chosen this moment to ask the doctor’s advice: “Suppose you had loved a woman and had been living with her for two or three years, and then left off caring for her, as one does, and began to feel that you had nothing in common with her. How would you behave in that case?” Just tell her to go where she pleases, says the doctor. But suppose, says Layevsky, she has no friends to go to, no money, no work. Five hundred rubles down or an allowance of twenty-five a month, the doctor says. Nothing more simple. But, Layevsky says, even supposing you have five hundred rubles and the woman is educated and proud, how would you do it?
Samoylenko was going to answer, but at that moment a big wave covered them both, then broke on the beach and rolled back noisily over the shingle. The friends got out and began dressing. “Of course, it is difficult to live with a woman if you don’t love her,” said Sa-moylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. “But one must look at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I would never show a sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I died.” He was at once ashamed of his own words; he pulled himself up and said: “But for aught I care, there might be no females at all. Let them all go to the devil.”
Layevsky nags away shamelessly. He is one of those “superfluous men of the sixties”—we have seen the type in On the Road and in Ivanov. “I have to generalize about everything I do,” Layevsky continues. “Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!” He had run away with a married woman to live an idyll, the simple life in the Caucasus, but now they are quarreling. The house smells of ironing, powder, medicine. The same curling irons are lying about every morning. The doctor says: “You can’t get on in the house without an iron,” and blushes at Layevsky speaking “so openly of a lady he knew.”
There is no hotel in the little resort. The doctor, who loves his food, runs a little table d’hôte where he entertains his friends, who include a silly young deacon who is Von Koren’s butt because he will talk of nothing but religion. The deacon’s only resource is liability to accident, a matter of importance to the story later on.
We now see Nadezhda Fyodorovna at home. She has no idea that Layevsky is plotting to leave her. She is absorbed in her restlessness. She has been unable to resist going to bed with a vulgar police officer in the town and is also being tempted by the son of a shopkeeper to whom she owes money for her gaudy dresses. She knows she cannot control her sexuality. The Duel is one of the rare Chekhov stories in which the sexual subject is explicit. Her state is activated by an intimate illness.
She was glad that of late Layevsky had been cold to her, reserved and polite, and at times even harsh and rude; in the past she had met all his outbursts, all his contemptuous, cold or strange incomprehensible glances, with tears, reproaches, and threats to leave him or starve herself to death; now she only blushed, looked guiltily at him, and was glad he was not affectionate to her. If he had abused her, or threatened her, it would have been better and pleasanter, since she felt hopelessly guilty towards him.
In her kitchen she flushes “crimson” when she looks at her cook, as though fearing the cook might hear her thoughts.
In another beach scene we see her sharing a bathing hut with a deeply respectable married woman. Later, after Na-dezhda’s husband has died, this woman will tell her that it is her duty to society to marry Layevsky at once, and will refer to the state of Nadezhda’s underclothes—emblems of sin—which she has seen at the beach. She cannot allow her children to come near her. Nadezhda is naïvely incredulous. While she lies in bed all day, Layevsky, who has a minor and neglected job in the Civil Service, is out all day and night on secretive journeys, intriguing to get the doctor to lend him money or to raise it from his friends, so that he can leave his mistress and go to Moscow.
We notice that Chekhov has the art of building his stories out of small journeys that lead to longer and more decisive journeys, in which his people gather together and then redistribute themselves and unknowingly create the stages of their fate. In The Duel the picnic scene is one of the most impressive examples of this art. His people drive in coaches to a gorge in the wild mountains where all will have the sensation that Nature has shut them in. As if a chorus, silent peasants, perhaps alien Tatars, will creep out and watch the picnic as polite Samoylenko lights a fire and fusses over cooking a meal. The tourists wander about and Layevsky provokes an argument with Von Koren. Later, Von Koren talks of Layevsky and Nadezhda as a pair of immoral brainless Japanese monkeys. She is wandering gaily off, followed by her ex-lover, the coarse police captain, whom she is ashamed of, and now snubs. He works himself up into a stage speech: “And so it seems our love has withered before it has blossomed, so to speak,” and sulks off. She is now approached by a beach acquaintance, the dandyish son of a rich shopkeeper, and is surprised to find herself thinking that she could easily get her large debt to him wiped out if she agreed to go to bed with him. It would be fun to do that and then send him packing.
The peasants, sitting apart in the darkness, start quietly singing, and this stirs the naive deacon and sends his mind traveling in the dream that in ten years’ time he will be a holy archimandrite, leading beautiful religious processions in his uncle’s church. At midnight the party will return quarreling, each frantic to pursue a secret dream. Nadezhda will be forced to give in to the police captain once more; his rival, the shopkeeper’s son, will take his revenge and in a very dramatic night scene will take Layevsky to the low house of rendezvous, where he will be convinced of his mistress’s guilt. Layevsky will have an attack of hysteria and accuse the doctor and Von Koren of “spying” on him and will fling at them a challenge to a duel. Firmly the challenge is accepted by Von Koren; he has been itching for it.
Chekhov is dramatic, but never melodramatic. Once more the rippling details of the journeys of the mind disperse melodrama. He has an instinct for the musical interweaving of changing moods. It is perfect that the duel is at dawn, at the remote, innocent scene of the picnic, where the morning landscape is changed after a stormy night. We see the foolish deacon, frightened and yet unable to resist the deplorable sight of a duel. In his way the deacon is a comic, calming, diversionary character, born to lose the thread of his ideas, but he is delightful in his naive curiosity, which saves him from his doubts: though duelists are heathens and an ecclesiastical person “should keep clear of their company,” was it just to shun them?