The long, insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her youth was passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest and idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers, biting his nails, and wearing her out with his caprices, led by degrees to her becoming possessed by desire, and as though she were mad, she thought of nothing else night and day. Breathing, looking, walking, she felt nothing but desire. The sound of the sea told her she must love; the darkness of evening said the same; the mountains the same. . . .
At a picnic among the craggy mountains and steep gorges, Nadezhda “wanted to skip and jump, to laugh, to shout, to tease, to flirt. In her cheap cotton dress with blue pansies on it, in her red shoes and . . . straw hat, she seemed to herself, little, simple, light, ethereal as a butterfly.” She cavorts among the rocks with two of the men at the picnic. Later, she realizes “she had gone too far, had been too free and easy in her behavior, and, overcome with misery, feeling herself heavy, stout, coarse, and drunk, she got into the first empty carriage.”
Chekhov has been called a misogynist, but in the face of such an acutely sensitive and sympathetic portrait as that of Nadezhda, the characterization does not hold up. “The Duel,” as its title suggests, is about the struggle between the ideologies and temperaments represented by Laevsky and von Koren and is apparently a work about men; but its driving force is what can only be called a kind of feminism. The fulcrum of Laevsky’s transformation is his realization that Nadezhda is a human being like him. He has found her in bed with one of the men she flirted with at the picnic, having been led to the place of assignation by the other:
He was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin and Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what he had begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This young, weak woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had deprived her of her husband, of her friends and of her country, and had brought her here—to the heat, to fever, and to boredom; and from day to day she was bound to reflect, like a mirror, his idleness, his viciousness and falsity—and that was all she had had to fill her weak, listless, pitiable life.
Laevsky has these thoughts sitting at a table in his house on the eve of the duel. A storm rages outside, and he remembers
how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without a hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with blue eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with the rain; they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal of thunder, the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly, while he crossed himself and made haste to repeat: “Holy, holy, holy. . . .” Oh, where had they vanished to! In what sea were they drowned, those dawning days of pure, fair life? He had no fear of the storm, no love of nature now; he had no God. All the confiding girls he had ever known had by now been ruined by him and those like him. All his life he had not planted one tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass; and living among the living, he had not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and lie, lie. . . .
After the storm is over, a scene takes place between Nadezhda and Laevsky that catches the reader unawares and almost too violently tugs at his heart:
“How miserable I am!” she said. “If only you knew how miserable I am! I expected,” she went on, half closing her eyes, “that you would kill me or turn me out of the house into the rain and storm, but you delay . . . delay. . . .”
Warmly and impulsively he put his arms around her and covered her knees and hands with kisses . . . he stroked her hair and looking into her face, realized that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near and dear to him, whom no one could replace.
The duel takes place among the craggy mountains and steep gorges—the landscape where Lermontov’s Pechorin fought his deadly duel with Grushnitskii. Lest the reader fail to hear the Lermontovean echo, and to grasp its irony, Chekhov inserts a farcical moment, when no one at the duel knows exactly what to do. “ ‘Gentlemen, who remembers the description in Lermontov?’ asked von Koren, laughing.” Laevsky escapes with his life. (He had fired in the air, and von Koren, on the point of going through with his intended execution of the useless, is distracted by a cry from a deacon who has seen the murderous look on his face.) Then, as a prelude to a new life of ordinary kindness and responsibility, Laevsky and Nadezhda sit in a garden— where else?—“huddled close together, saying nothing, or dreaming aloud of their happy life in the future, in brief, broken sentences, while it seemed to him that he had never spoken at such length or so eloquently.” The story ends with a glimpse of their new life, and with no assurance that they will be able to sustain the rigors of an existence stripped of illusion and devoted to prosaic work. Characteristically, Chekhov does not allow them the comfort of Tolstoyan pastoral—he does not let them fulfill the fantasy that brought them to the Caucasus. (“We would pick out a plot of ground, would toil in the sweat of our brow, would have a vineyard and a field, and so on.”) The work Laevsky does to pay his debts is not horticulture but the tedious, ill-paid work of copying. (How Nadezhda spends her days is left to the reader’s imagination. When we last see her, she is a recessive, diminished figure.) Chekhov’s gardens at Melikhovo and Autka were his hobby; the gardens in his stories and plays, like Marianne Moore’s imaginary gardens with real toads in them, are something more serious. (This may be why Chekhov never entrusted them to amateurs; his imaginary gardens are always in the care of professionals.) The garden in which Laevsky and Nadezhda huddle—like the garden of his youth, like every garden in Chekhov—is a symbolic place of grace. The garden at Autka is merely a real garden.
Four
"They say that Olga refused to sleep with Chekhov because she was afraid of catching his TB,” Nina says as we walk back to the car along the footpath above the sea in Oreanda.
“I’ve never heard that,” I say. “From their correspondence it seems clear that they did sleep together.”