SOURCE: “Allusion and Dialogue in ‘The Duel,’” inReading Chekhov's Text, edited by Robert Louis Jackson, Northwestern University Press, 1993, pp. 169–78.

In the following essay, Durkin investigates allusions to the writing of N. S. Laskov in “The Duel,” and examines the opposition between science and the humanities in the story.

The central characters in “The Duel” (“Duel”, 1891), the “humanist” Laevsky and the “scientist” von Koren, exist in an atmosphere thick with literary and cultural allusion, from Shakespeare through Pushkin, Lermontov, and Turgenev to Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Tolstoy's “Kreutzer Sonata.” Indeed the conflict that arises between Laevsky and von Koren can be read in part as a struggle over which of them truly deserves the designation of hero, the figure who defines the world of the literary work. The resultant cacophony of egos in large part derives from the fact that Laevsky and von Koren, for all their apparent...