A review by jasonfurman
The Duel by Anton Chekhov

5.0

What made The Duel so interesting is that all the characters have read--or meant to have read--the major earlier Russian works and are fashioning their lives in relation to them. In particular, the protagonist is a self-styled superfluous man who was reared on Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev--and instead of authentically sharing the impulses of the characters in these novels/stories, he is a pale imitation of them--and most of all when it comes to his duel which is a pale imitation of the earlier ones as well. Like Tolstoy, this novella inhabits the mind and psychology for a sequence of different characters, presenting all of their perspectives of the conflicts at the heart of it which, like Tolstoy, are related to marriage, infidelity, and falling out of love from that infidelity (which itself is perceived by the character through the eyes of Anna Karenina). In many ways, it makes it a fitting capstone to 19th Century Russian literature.