The Duel

It is a significant feature of Chekhov’s narrative that each character’s perspective is featured, and Chapter 5 belongs to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. The character’s perspective is balanced by a third-person narrator who is able to make observations and, crucially, can also see into their minds to note the psychological games taking place in their heads.

In parallel to the first scene of the novel, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s character is introduced in the context of bathing—alternations of heat and refreshment that expose her own alternations of oppression, under the weight of her guilt and self-doubt, and release, expressed as a coquettish display of her body. Although Chekhov’s narrator and characters rehearse values of female modesty in ways that express a traditional patriarchalism, simplistic misogyny is avoided in the fact that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna shows herself off to others for the same reason that Samoylenko and Von Koren admire themselves in their imagination and, in Von Koren’s case, directly in a mirror (59). This reason is a paradoxical lack of self-surety, or a sense of one’s dependence on others for valuation (or in Von Koren’s case, submission), which is particularly strong in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna’s case. Her self-display signals her utter dependency upon men, something that will become more explicit as the novella continues.

Chapter 5 continues to draw parallels between Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and Laevsky insofar as Nadyezhda Fyodorovna feels the same hints of guilt amidst self-pity: “something at the bottom of her soul dimly and obscurely whispered to her that she was a petty, common, miserable worthless women” (94). The couple’s guilty feelings about their life in the Caucauses in turn introduces the theme of work, which is also important to Von Koren. The couple had imagined that they would plant a garden and work the land but did not do the less romantic work necessary to actualize these plans—another mark of their tendency to avoid life, including their own actions, for the sake of fantasy, including their own potential. As Von Koren says, characters are nothing if not their actually committed actions, meaning that potential makes no sense, and it is Von Koren to whom work is so important as well.

The scene of the picnic introduces another aspect of the Caucasian landscape, moving from the sea into the mountains. Here a local Tartar marks a contrast between himself and the Russians, whom he regards as essentially touristic interlopers, but there is a subtle sense of the imposing nature of this place: “the first impression in all was a feeling that they would never get out of that place again” (104). Against this backdrop, a dialogue takes place at the picnic between Laevsky and Von Koren that builds the intensity in the first of two encounters before the resulting duel. Such things take time in Chekhov, and plot is not rushed. In this exchange, Chekhov’s psychological prose is again marked by its subtlety, tracing how a character will think one thing and say another, revealing what motivates their speech. An example of this is when Laevsky praises the natural sciences because he wants to make amends with Von Koren, whose hatred he keenly feels and with which—owing to his own creeping self-doubt—he even begins to sympathize.