SOURCE: Irina Kirk, “Search for a Philosophy of Life,” in Anton Chekhov, Twayne Publishers, 1981, pp. 56–92.

In the following excerpt, Kirk discusses plot, character, and theme in “The Duel.”

“The Duel” was serialized in the periodical Novoe vremya in 1891. While Chekhov was writing the story he often met and talked with the zoologist Nikolai Wagner about the survival of the fittest, heredity, degeneration, and other topics which were in vogue at that time. Chekhov's position in these conversations was that the human spirit is capable of conquering the weaknesses of heredity and of overcoming certain character deficiencies. Of course, Chekhov was not speaking in a religious sense when he mentioned the “human spirit,” but rather in the existential frame of reference that Albert Camus had in mind in The Plague when he wrote, “to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: there are more things to...