The Duel – Usado

In Anton Chekhov’s The Duel, escalating animosity between two men with opposing 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 ther man to be unworthy of survival and is further enraged by his treatment of Nadya. As the confrontation between the tow becomes increasingly heated, it leads to a duel that is as comically inadvertent as it is inevitable. The Duel is the fullest and one of the most subtle examples of Chekhov’s narrative art.