Includes a new forward by the screenwriter Mary Bing
Anton Chekhov’s The Duel the escalating
animosity between two men with opposed philosophies of life is
played out against the backdrop of a seedy resort on the Black Sea
coast.
Laevsky is a dissipated romantic given to
gambling and flirtation; he has run off with another man’s wife,
the beautiful but vapid Nadya, and now finds himself tiring of her.
The scientist von Koren is contemptuous of Laevsky; as a fanatical
devotee of Darwin, von Koren believes the other man to be unworthy
of survival and is further enraged by his treatment of Nadya. As
the confrontation between the two becomes increasingly heated, it
leads to a duel that is as comically inadvertent as it is
inevitable. Masterfully translated by the award-winnning Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Duel is one of the most subtle
examples of Chekhov’s narrative art.