The Duel

Two government workers, Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, and army doctor Alexandr Daviditch Samoylenko, have relocated to a southern seaside town. It is the late 19th century in the Caucauses, a region between the Baltic and Caspian seas colonized by the Russian empire. Other “officers, local officials, and the visitors,” constitute the local Russian community, which is introduced by their shared morning rituals (27).

Loosely following the perspective of Laevsky, the third-person narrator uses Laevsky’s breakfast meeting with Samoylenko to introduce Samoylenko’s key character trait as the contrast between a gruff exterior and his peacekeeping but simultaneously rank-sensitive nature. Samoylenko is a product of a hierarchical society. He is good-natured but within severe limits, acting submissively toward superiors and condescendingly toward inferiors.

Laevsky appeals to Samoylenko for advice on his cooled love affair with a married woman. Laevsky poses the question of leaving his mistress, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, initially in vague philosophical terms, and this catches Samoylenko off-guard. Samoylenko responds that a man should do as he pleases. Notably, Laevsky presses the ethics of the matter, rejecting Samoylenko’s suggestion to pay his mistress off like a sex worker. Laevsky will later overcome his own ethical objections in order to pursue his self-interest whereas Samoylenko will adhere to the belief, which he eventually lets slip in this exchange, that a man should stay with his mistress for the sake of duty, regardless of how he feels about her. Given the severely limited legal and social protections for unmarried yet separated women, abandoning a mistress would mean leaving her with virtually no rights.

Laevsky admits the truth of his situation when he admits that it was a mistake to romanticize life in the Caucasus with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. However, he now begins to romanticize single life in St. Petersburg: “The North […] the pines and the mushrooms […] the people and ideas” are myths associated with St. Petersburg, referring to populist politics, urban intellectualism, and a climate with its own kind of mystique (36). What Laevsky calls “a life and death struggle” is simply ordinary life as the novella defines it. In Samoylenko’s moralistic terms, life requires patience. Against life Laevsky pits fantasy, calling fantasy love. Life is the ordinariness that has come to settle upon his cooled affair. Fantasy is the primary self-deception that ordinary life can be transcended—and responsibility avoided.

The philosophical dialogue of the first chapter takes a sudden turn when Laevsky asks about a letter he has received informing him that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s husband has died of a malady of the brain. Laevsky feels responsible, since “the softening of the brain” sounds like emotional torment that he could have caused, and it is this creeping sense of culpability that impels Laevsky to reject responsibility all the more strongly in his plans to leave Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.

Laevsky’s reference to degeneracy, or decline, becomes ironic when Samoylenko begins to see Laevsky’s problem as childishness and asks, irrelevantly, whether Laevsky’s mother is living. Laevsky nevertheless understands his impulse to flee Nadyezhda Fyodorovna as rooted in experience, which has made him, in his own understanding, justifiably cynical.

Parting from Samoylenko, Laevsky returns home to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, in whose every action he sees a confirmation of his need to escape. Laevsky’s behavior toward Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is cordial—a sign of his mental break from her as well as his guilt. Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, who was once keen to bicker, responds to the felt shift in the relationship with timidity. Laevsky’s mounting hatred—the result of his own misplaced guilt—swells to the point that he imagines murdering Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, although it is far less important to Laevsky to commit such a deed—which would go against his general passivity—than to imaginatively justify himself.

Once Laevsky is alone, his guilt returns, but he misunderstands it, feeling guilty primarily that he has wasted his own life in the Caucauses and giving himself over to fantasies about a new life in Petersburg, where he imagines he can reach his full potential. He reflects on his substantial debts as another tie holding him to the Caucauses.

Meanwhile, Samoylenko returns home, where he finds two of his frequent dinner guests: a young zoologist, Von Koren, and a young deacon, Pobyedov. Satisfied with his own image much like Samoylenko and condescending to the deacon’s apparently unfocused pursuits, Von Koren engages in an intensive critique of Laevsky over dinner. In Von Koren’s view, Laevsky is useless to society to the extent that murdering him would constitute no sin, since the overall health of society is more important than individuals. Von Koren criticizes Samoylenko’s kindness to Laevsky as indiscriminate.

The ethical argument of the first chapter continues into this scene, with Von Koren adding his view that people should be judged by their actions. Von Koren summarizes the character of Laevsky as nothing more than “wine, cards, slippers, and women” (69). He notes that Laevsky makes romance the center of his life, bringing all conversations around to the issue.

Samoylenko responds to the critique of Laevsky with indignation, but eventually calms down at the thought that the younger generation, which he feels is well-represented by Von Koren and Pobyedov, is worthy of his patronage. Pobyedov engages the conversation only with laughter and dismisses Von Koren’s demands for “real work,” citing the heat and his own conditions of uncertainty in the Caucauses.