The Duel and Other Stories

About the book

Laevsky has grown dissatisfied with his life beside Nadezhda Fyodorovna and begins imagining an escape from circumstances he helped create. Among those around him, the humane doctor Samoylenko and the severe zoologist von Koren respond very differently to his weakness and evasions. The title novella brings their practical entanglements and moral theories into increasingly uncomfortable contact. Chekhov lets the reader see the inadequacy of easy condemnation without making self-excuse persuasive. The accompanying stories, including Neighbours, At Home, and The Princess, revisit the distance between a person's account of their conduct and its effect on others. Together they make ethical judgment a demanding activity, requiring attention to dependency, loneliness, and the particular circumstances that broad principles can too readily dismiss.

• Moral judgment
• Responsibility
• Self-deception

Why read it

For a sustained conflict between compassion and moral severity, followed by stories that complicate apparently straightforward judgments.

Novella and stories · translated by Constance Garnett