Depending on your definition of “novella,” Chekhov wrote nine in his career. “The Duel” is among the earlier ones, and among the longest.
Set in a claustrophobic, sweltering beach town in the Caucasus, the story traces a festering feud between two men who could not be more unalike: the sybaritic philanderer, Laevsky (a name that seems too on the nose when rendered in English), and the priggish, hard-working Von Koren.
Laevsky, an aristocrat of limited means and a minor government position, has thrown aside the respectable life of metropolitan St. Petersburg, decamping to the southern reaches of the Caucasus, where he is shacking up with another man’s wife, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. But after two years at the beach, he has grown sick of everything, including Nadyezhda. He claims to pine for “the real Russia”–cold forests, cabbage soup, the cultural bustle of St. Petersburg–even as he lives a life that would likely get him cast out of society in St. Petersburg: He spends his days drinking and gambling (the card game vint)–not to mention living openly with another man’s wife.
But Laevsky has a secret: He has learned that Nadyezhda’s husband has died. Cruelly, he has kept that information from her, for fear that she would then want to marry him.
Laevsky, in other words, is a despicable cad. But he isn’t entirely reprehensible. He cannot bring himself to end things with Nadyezhda because she has no family and no way to support herself. To cast her off would be too cruel. And he doesn’t have the means to simply pay her off. So he is stuck for the time being, although he seems likely to finally give in to his baser desires and escape Nadyezhda and the Caucasus entirely.
Von Koren, in contrast, is a dedicated and humorless scientist who has come to the coast not to laze in the sun but to study the local wildlife. (Von Koren is based on an actual zoologist of Chekhov’s acquaintance. The real-life scientist published a study of certain spider’s sexual behavior, which, like the name “Laevsky,” seems too on the nose… Fortunately, Von Koren’s zoologic specialty is never revealed.)
Von Koren detests everything about Laevsky, and their hatred bleeds into the open, ultimately leading them to face off in a duel.
It’s a decent story, plot-heavy and, once it gets going, full of tension. The tale is marred by a subplot involving the local police chief.
What is particularly noteworthy to me about this work is the strangeness of the setting: It reminds me of Hemingway or Bowles or maybe Lowry in the way that it details the life of ex-pats living more or less indolently amongst “the other,” in this case Muslims, or “Mohammedans,” as it is put in this translation. But this foreign land is not foreign at all—it’s simply the southern reaches of Russia.
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Like “The Duel,” “A Living Chattel” is a plot-heavy work that unfolds (mostly) in a resort town, this one in the Crimea, “not far from Feodosia.” Both stories have a sort of “Margaritaville” feel to them. The warm resort towns in the Crimea and the southern Caucasus were where some Russians went to shuck off the strictures of northern life. In Chekhov’s telling, there is rarely a happy ending on the southern reaches of Russia.
A Chekhov Circus 