SOURCE: “The Duel,” in Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 178–205.

In the following excerpt, Hahn describes “The Duel” as “novelistic” in form and method, explores its theme, and compares the work to the fiction of Tolstoy.

But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my inept theories about it.

(Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Chapter 10 (London: Collins, 1958), p. 373).

The second great work to emerge from Chekhov's highly complex reaction to Tolstoy is “The Duel” (1891). In his letters Chekhov calls it a ‘novel’, and it is indeed one of the most novelistic of his works. To begin with, it has […] an unusually wide range of fully developed characters. Apart from Von Koren...