It is as though Chekhov had determined to recover all critical reputation that he had lost during his absence over the previous year and a half. The result, ‘The Duel’, was the last major work he published in Suvorin’s New Times; over the autumn and winter of 1891 the story took up all the space that Suvorin had reserved for fiction, thus earning the resentment of those writers who now had no outlet.

‘The Duel’ is Chekhov’s most conventional work: it has two heroes who represent opposing sets of opinions, one precise, scientific and western, the other vague, intuitive and Slavonic; their ideological and moral enmity is crystallized in a duel which ends farcically. What clearer reminiscence of Turgenev could there be? It is hard to think of a major Russian writer of the nineteenth century who did not write a story that could have been entitled ‘The Duel’. Likewise, Chekhov has placed his characters in the claustrophobic setting of a Black Sea garrison town (suspiciously like Sukhumi), a Wild West setting (one might sometimes think) that lends itself to the taut plotting. The build-up to the duel (and even its apparently salutary consequences for both parties) also follows classical lines. The differences, however, are more important than the similarities to conventional duelling novels. For one thing, neither party’s views command much respect: they are rationalizations on the one hand of the aesthete (Layevsky) and his incurable idleness and on the other hand of the scientist (von Koren) and his involuntary hyperactivity. What distinguishes this ideological battle from those in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Turgenev is Chekhov’s subtle authorial preference for a third way, the way of the inarticulate or uncomprehending non-combatants. The absurd mediator Dr Samoylenko declares that if he stopped loving a woman he would make it his life’s work to hide the fact, unlike the ‘honest’ cad Layevsky or the ‘honest’ bluff Przhevalsky-like conquistador von Koren. The Tatar innkeeper does not care whether people worship Allah or Jehovah, as long as they respect God. The naïve deacon interrupts the duel (over which an ominous green light is falling) and prevents a clear resolution of conflict. And not least, a group of indigenous Caucasians sit in a circle on the other side of a river by which the querulous Russians are picnicking and tell each other stories in a language which none of the colonists can understand. Doctor, deacon, Tatar and Abkhaz natives have an instinctive talent for peace and harmony which no proponent of any ideology can achieve – in this lies the novel and powerful import of ‘The Duel’ and it is thus that Layevsky’s absurd self-justification seems to accuse Tolstoy of hypocrisy and misogyny and scientific rationalism of brutal destructiveness. Above all, like Maupassant’s best prose, so the narrative of ‘The Duel’ is dominated by the sea: it drowns out soliloquies, it drives back the travellers. As in Chekhov’s mature work – ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, for example – the sea represents a natural force not just more powerful but more significant than us, and those that recognize natural forces (the Tatar, the deacon, the doctor, the Abkhaz) have the advantage over the articulate intellectuals who occupy the foreground of the narrative.

If Sakhalin was the greatest trauma in Chekhov’s life, its consequences took time to make their mark. ‘Ward No. 6’, perhaps the most pessimistic work that Russian literature has ever produced, was not written until Chekhov himself had prepared what he hoped would be his own idyllic interlude, a refuge in the country. ‘The Duel’ with its reconciliation, even partial redemption, with its cast all alive at the end of the story, is a deceptively happy conclusion to the first period of Chekhov’s development.

FURTHER READING

Gordon McVay (tr.), Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (London: Folio Society, 1994), the best selection and translation of letters.

Brian Reeves (tr.), The Island of Sakhalin (Cambridge: Ian Faulkner, 1993).

SECONDARY LITERATURE: GENERAL BOOKS

Toby W. Clyman, A Chekhov Companion (Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 1985), a very valuable if expensive collection of essays, with extensive bibliography.

P. Debreczeny and T. Eekman (eds), Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (Columbus: Slavica, 1977).

Thomas Eekman (ed.), Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 208 pp.

W. Gerhardie, Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (London: Macdonald, 1974), ‘Bloomsbury’ Chekhov, but well-informed.

R. L. Jackson, Chekhov: A Collection of Essays: 20th-Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

R. L. Jackson (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1993).

S. Koteliansky (tr., ed.), Anton Chekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences (New York: Blom, 1968).

Virginia Llewellyn-Smith, Chekhov and the Lady with the Little Dog (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

V. S.