The Duel is one of Chekhov’s longest works, which for a writer who was, as Nabokov put it, “a sprinter not a stayer” has structural implications. While Chekhov’s shorter stories often feature a central character or two in a social landscape that is masterfully sketchy and palpable at the same time, The Duel has at its center a group that has willy-nilly become a community, stuck on the Caucasian coast, a far-flung province of the vast Russian empire. This makes The Duel akin to Chekhov’s dramas. 3 Like his dramas (Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard), The Duel is built around a group of people connected tenuously through the situation of their relative isolation. The isolation is not merely geographical but, more important, psychological—indeed, metaphysical. These people have isolated themselves from the world through a series of decisions and indecisions, which are recounted in the course of the narrative. Their lives have become, to themselves and to others, a burden “they can neither get rid of nor carry.”4
Chekhovian characters “broke their own lives, and the lives of others, they were silly, weak, hysterical. . . . They missed opportunities, they shunned action, they spent sleepless nights in planning worlds they could not build.”5 In The Duel, Laevsky is doubtless the most Chekhovian of the cast, but the rest (Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, Samoylenko, the deacon, even Von Koren) do not lag far behind—for each of them, life is elsewhere, and what is here is neither death nor hell but the limbo of merely existing. What they share is remoteness from everything— they’re floating on a non-lifeboat, far away from the sunken mother-ship, far away from the coast, forced to look at one another until dubious salvation arrives. In The Duel, as in the plays, it is precisely this isolation, this togetherness in loneliness, that forces the dramatic hand. Chekhov’s people cannot escape one another as they cannot escape their own lives, so in being forced to face their comrades in isolation, they face their own failures. In The Duel, for instance, Laevsky confronts his own shabby life as he’s confronting Von Koren.
The basic dramatic setup in The Duel, as in the plays, is a democracy of petty tragedy (or tragic pettiness): Inasmuch as complaining marks the tragic absence of the action that would eliminate the reason for the suffering, everybody’s complaint is equally valid, or equally invalid. Consequently, there are no characters unworthy of Chekhov’s (and the reader’s) attention and moral consideration. But the lack of righteous hierarchy confused many of my students, who, used to sympathy and judgment as the reader’s main tools, could not figure out who was “positive” and who was “negative” in Chekhov’s stories. In The Duel, Laevsky is a shallow, lazy, selfish man whose torments of indecision, however, are all too familiar to anyone who has experienced the sudden disappearance of love, and who seems to redeem himself by the end of the story. Von Koren is a hardworking, honest man whose criticism of and loathing for Laevsky appear reasonable and justified, but who is, with his penchant for radical solutions, a prototype of a fascist. (“The Germans have ruined you!” Samoylenko tells him.) Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is a flaky adulteress, but her adultery rises out of an unquenchable desire to live to the fullest extent (a desire that is not hard to fathom). Samoylenko is a kind doctor (a stock character in Chekhov) who is ashamed of his kindness, which borders on foolishness, but he is scarcely devoid of vanity—he likes to be addressed as “Your Excellency.” One way to describe this situation is to say that Chekhov’s world lacks an absolute moral center: Nobody’s absolutely right, and nobody’s absolutely wrong; or, as Laevsky says at the end of the story, “Nobody knows the truth.” This absence of an absolute — and absolutist—central morality prevents the reader from identifying with one or another of the characters: One cannot say, “I’m like this character.” Rather, one says, “I’m like these people.” The reader is invited to join without judgment the larger community of the meek and the confused.
Chekhov is a radical humanist, the kindest of the so-called relativists. In his world, a judgmental, fanatical God cannot provide a moral center—God is cast out of hell, where the sinners are bonded in suffering. It is not only that nobody’s perfect, but that nobody has ever been perfect. There never was a state of human perfection; there never was the Fall, because there never was an Eden. Consequently, a human being can sin only against another human being, not against God, and hence can be forgiven only by another human being. This is the Chekhovian kindness: We can get up after our small falls only with the unconditional love of other human beings. Chekhov’s greatest strength was his weakness for the weak, for he knew that, as Nabokov says, “perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.”6 It is this humanistic teleology that makes Chekhov a great writer. Because his gaze does not seek the moral center, because his mind does not care about the absolute, he sees the insignificant, he detects the minute and magnifies it, he senses the smallest quivers of the human soul. His sole interest is the life of his fellow human beings, in all its banality and overwhelming insignificance.
What can be called the plot of The Duel consists of elements that would fit snugly into an adventure novel or neo-romantic drama rife with the fireworks of elevated emotions and lofty speeches: At the far, “wild” borders of the Empire, a small contingent of men and women are caught up in a whirlwind of passion, adultery, jealousy, and conflict that culminates in a duel. But Chekhov deliberately and systematically undercuts all the spectacular possibilities—indeed, he entirely side-steps the spectacle—and instead focuses on the personal struggles that tend to thrive in boredom. Thus, in describing the moment Laevsky discovers Nadyezhda Fyodorovna in bed with Kirilin—the moment that to a lesser, less kind writer would bespeak its dramatic importance and force him to paint the emotional apocalypse in broad strokes— Chekhov offers no more than a merely informative sentence: “Laevsky . . . saw Kirilin, and beside him Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.” Then, rather than spending bloated paragraphs on Laevsky’s train of thought, doubtless derailed, he directs his gaze at his body and its discomfort:
As he went home he waved his right arm awkwardly and looked carefully at the ground under his feet, trying to step where it was smooth. At home in his study, he walked backwards and forwards, rubbing his hands, and awkwardly shrugging his shoulders and neck, as though his jacket and shirt were too tight.
And that is all. When in the position to choose, as it were, between the moral judgments and the body, Chekhov chooses the body. If he has to choose between the spectacle and the detail, he chooses the detail, which, besides being truer to the human experience, is somehow more unexpected, more exciting. Chekhov is not a master of plot or an exceptional stylist (his literary style, Nabokov said, “goes to parties in its everyday suit”).7 He is the master of the character.8 His mastery is a matter not of skill but of sensibility (for what is mastery after all, if not a sensibility carefully carried to its logical extreme?). Chekhov’s sensibility, his kindness, allows him to pay extraordinary attention to his characters’ idiosyncrasies, to see them at the oddest and most private moments, while avoiding voyeurism in favor of understanding. Thus Laevsky is revealed, before he delivers his usual self-abnegating speeches, as someone who, while talking, gazes “attentively at the pink palms of his hands, [bites] his nails, or [pinches] his cuffs.” He’s also quick to compare his indecision with Hamlet’s—such equation always a symptom of petty self-importance and a paucity of imagination. Similarly, Von Koren is shown, before any of his proto-fascist invectives, as someone who, while waiting for dinner at the good doctor’s house, “took a pistol from the whatnot, and screwing up his left eye, took deliberate aim at the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, or stood still at the looking-glass and gazed a long time [at himself ]. . . . The contemplation of his own image seemed to afford him almost more satisfaction . . . than playing with the pistols.” Nadyezhda Fyodorovna hears a couple of French sailors speaking and ends up longing “to dance and speak French,” her bosom “heaving with unaccountable delight” at the thought. And the deacon “was very easily amused, and laughed at every trifle till he got a stitch in his side. . . . He watched people’s faces greedily, listened without blinking, and it could be seen that his eyes filled with laughter and face was tense with expectation of the moment when he could let himself go and burst into laughter.” And Samoylenko the good doctor (those who don’t like him will end up under the gallows) “was on familiar terms with every one in town, lent every one money . . . patched up quarrels, [and] arranged picnics at which he cooked shashlik and an awfully good soup of gray mullets.” There’s no detail in Chekhov that with a combination of kindness and precision cannot be transformed into a human revelation—even Samoylenko’s awfully good soup of gray mullets.