SOURCE: Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, Hodder & Stoughton, 1988, pp. 97–111.

In the following excerpt, Pritchett analyzes “The Duel,” focusing on character and the work's “playlike architecture.”

In “The Duel” we see the conflict between Tolstoy's Christian ethic and Darwinism and a reply to the accusation that Chekhov had evaded the crucial Russian demand for a statement of his “convictions.” In this letter he calls “The Duel” a novel. It is not episodic and haphazard like the discarded Stories of the Lives of My Friends, but a long, carefully designed piece of work held together by a central conflict of ideas sustained to the end and rooted in the interplay of the characters and the influences of the scene. It is one of his most sustained yet various and discreetly ordered fictions. It seems to have been provoked by a meeting with a German zoologist, a strong Darwinian and a...