The Duel (Movie Tie-in Edition)

By Anton Chekhov

Includes a new forward by the screenwriter Mary Bing 

In Anton Chekhov’s The Duel the escalating animosity between two men with opposed philosophies of life is played out against the backdrop of a seedy resort on the Black Sea coast.

Laevsky is a dissipated romantic given to gambling and flirtation; he has run off with another man’s wife, the beautiful but vapid Nadya, and now finds himself tiring of her. The scientist von Koren is contemptuous of Laevsky; as a fanatical devotee of Darwin, von Koren believes the other man to be unworthy of survival and is further enraged by his treatment of Nadya. As the confrontation between the two becomes increasingly heated, it leads to a duel that is as comically inadvertent as it is inevitable. Masterfully translated by the award-winnning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Duel is one of the most subtle examples of Chekhov’s narrative art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307742964

Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov was born in Taganrog, in southern Russia, and in his youth paid for his own education and supported his entire family by writing short, satirical sketches of Russian life. Though he eventually became a physician and once considered medicine his principal career, he continued to gain popularity and praise as a writer for various Russian newspapers, eventually authoring more literary work and ultimately his most well-known plays, including Ivanov, The Seagull, and Uncle Vanya. He died of tuberculosis in 1904, and is regarded as one of the best short story writers in history, influencing such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, and Raymond Carver.

Reviews for The Duel (Movie Tie-in Edition)

[alanteder · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"The Duel is Beckett with great hats." - Mary Bing, screenwriter."The Duel" (1891) was a novella that Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) wrote concurrently with the first parts of his non-fiction accounts of penal colony conditions on "Sakhalin Island" (1891-1895). I read the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky where only the one novella was published as a tie-in edition to the 2010 feature film version directed by Dover Kosashvili with a screenplay by Mary Bing. Mary Bing's foreword in this edition provides a great entry point to reading the work. " ...take heart, Chekhov loves life. The Duel is Beckett with great hats. And naked women, and guns that go off, and an absolution that extends to its audience. May we have the grace to take it."Introducing the idea of Chekhov as a forerunner of Beckett's humour may not be to everyone's taste, but it certainly agreed with me. I would have found some of these characters hard to put up with for long otherwise, but felt more of a degree of empathy when human weakness and foibles had a degree of humour to them. The main character, named Laevsky, comes across as a n'er do well, a slacker civil servant who drinks and gambles away his money at cards and schemes to leave his lover Nadya, who had previously left her husband for him. The antagonist is a zoologist named Von Koren who looks on Laevsky as a waste of space that should be eliminated to allow evolution and life to proceed properly. Laevsky starts having nervous attacks that are signs of a complete breakdown to come and he hotheadedly provokes Von Koren to challenge him to a duel. Meanwhile their friends, a doctor and a deacon bemusedly look on. Nadya has her own little plots afoot as she has admirers in the seaside town than Laevsky doesn't even know about. It all resolves with pistols at dawn.