On top of everything else, the Chekhovian human revelations—the moments when the intense contrast between the immensity of human life and the banality of its particles produces sparks—are often simply funny. Take the way the deacon laughs at the wrong moments; or Nadyezhda Fyodorovna offering a truistic non sequitur while swimming (“There are many conventional ideas in the world . . . and life is not easy as it seems”); or Laevsky identifying with Anna Karenina (“And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought: ‘How true it is, how true!’ ”); or the way Samoylenko, in the midst of a passionate— indeed, ominous—argument with Von Koren and his totalitarianism, manages to spot the deacon (mis)eating the dinner he made: “ ‘What are you saying!’ said Samoylenko [to Von Koren]. ‘With pepper, with pepper!’ he cried in a voice of despair, seeing that the deacon was eating stuffed aubergines without pepper.” All this confirms that Nabokov was absolutely right when he said:
Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness. . . . Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you didn’t see their fun, because both were linked up. 9
The Duel is as long as a Chekhov story can successfully go, which makes it necessary reading. For all the Chekhovian talents and gifts are augmented here: his kindness; his careful, patient buildup of the relations between the characters; his consistent, humorous attention to the revealing detail; and his uncanny, radically human and humanistic ability to extract profound meaning from the dullest and most banal of lives, thereby redeeming them—all the things that my students ultimately recognized and appreciated. The Duel is essential at a time when the gallows are being built in the name of freedom. “In the age of ruddy Goliaths,” Nabokov said, “it is useful to read about delicate Davids.”
ALEKSANDAR HEMON is the author of the acclaimed The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man. He was born in Sarajevo in 1964 and moved to Chicago in 1992 with only a basic command of English. He began writing in English in 1995, and his fiction has since appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories 1999. He lives in Chicago with his wife.
NOTES
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature. Edited and with an introduction by Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1981.
Ibid., 247.
As Nabokov suggests, “Chekhov’s qualities as a playwright are merely his qualities as a writer of long short stories” (Ibid., 252).
Ibid., 254.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 252.
“Chekhov was the first among the writers to rely so much upon the undercurrents of suggestion to convey a definite meaning” (Ibid).
Ibid.
I
It was eight o’clock in the morning—the time when the officers, the local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to drink tea or coffee. Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a thin, fair young man of twenty-eight, wearing the cap of a clerk in the Ministry of Finance and with slippers on his feet, coming down to bathe, found a number of acquaintances on the beach, and among them his friend Samoylenko, the army doctor.
With his big cropped head, short neck, his red face, his big nose, his shaggy black eyebrows and grey whiskers, his stout puffy figure and his hoarse military bass, this Samoylenko made on every newcomer the unpleasant impression of a gruff bully; but two or three days after making his acquaintance, one began to think his face extraordinarily good-natured, kind, and even handsome. In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always ready to be of use. He was on familiar terms with every one in the town, lent every one money, doctored every one, made matches, patched up quarrels, arranged picnics at which he cooked shashlik1 and an awfully good soup of grey mullets. He was always looking after other people’s affairs and trying to interest some one on their behalf, and was always delighted about something. The general opinion about him was that he was without faults of character. He had only two weaknesses: he was ashamed of his own good nature, and tried to disguise it by a surly expression and an assumed gruff-ness; and he liked his assistants and his soldiers to call him “Your Excellency,” although he was only a civil councillor.2
“Answer one question for me, Alexandr Daviditch,” Laevsky began, when both he and Samoylenko were in the water up to their shoulders. “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?”
“It’s very simple. ‘You go where you please, madam’—and that would be the end of it.”
“It’s easy to say that! But if she has nowhere to go? A woman with no friends or relations, without a farthing, who can’t work . . .”
“Well? Five hundred roubles down or an allowance of twenty-five roubles a month—and nothing more. It’s very simple.”
“Even supposing you have five hundred roubles and can pay twenty-five roubles a month, the woman I am speaking of is an educated woman and proud. Could you really bring yourself to offer her money? And 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 Samoylenko, shaking the sand out of his boots. “But one must look at the thing humanely, Vanya. If it were my case, I should never show a sign that I did not love her, and I should go on living with her till I died.”