43 pages • 1 hour read
Anton ChekhovThe Duel
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1891A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Heat
The novella began with the image of heat, which is a recurrent motif for the oftentimes burdensome pressures of environments and bodies—that is, human life. Heat is also associated with the exoticized landscape of the Caucauses, a region colonized by Russians. Notably, all the characters in the story occupy a colonizer’s role, since they are not indigenous to the region and since their presence is made possible by Russia’s imperialism. The Caucasian south is a very different climate from the Russian north, so that noting the heat is also noting this difference.
Nights that are “stifling” (77) symbolize the inability to escape from external (and internal) circumstance: Even the promise of nighttime relief from the sun, coupled with a release from conscious thoughts, cannot be fulfilled when Laevsky is tormented by his unaddressed conscience. The heat, like the sinking sense of thoughts that cannot be confronted, exerts its constant pressure, a fact made especially clear in Laevsky’s sleepless night.
Laevsky, Pobyedov, and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna complain of the “insufferable heat” (33), claiming that their “brains melt” and they nearly die as a result (82, 90).
The use of the heat as an excuse for inaction is poignantly expressed by the narrator who interprets Laevsky’s thoughts: “the deserted seashore, the insatiable heat, and the monotony of the smoky lilac mountains […] overwhelmed him with depression” (52). Part of the landscape’s beauty, heat is nevertheless interpreted by Laevsky as oppressive because he is concerned mostly with how it affects him. Samoylenko also suffers from the heat, as when he “perspires from the heat of the kitchen” (81) in supervising the preparation of dinner for his guests. Heat is something that encourages drowsiness, a kind of distance from reality, as when Samoylenko “grew drowsy [in] the sultry heat, the stillness and the delicious languor […]” (81).
Indeed, heat plays on the difference between reality and fantasy, becoming fantasy in such instances as when Nadyezhda Fyodorovna is induced by the heat into a kind of trance, feeling that “she must live, live…” (93). In this context, “living” actually means escaping from her current life in search of something more. Later, however, the heat takes the form of reality when it is associated with Von Koren’s hatred toward Laevsky (117).
Spiders
Spiders symbolize vaguely perceived threats. Laevsky introduces the symbol in the context of his belief that his current environment, full of “fancy poisonous spiders, scorpions or snakes lurking under every stone” (33), and not his own behavior, threatens him. Spiders are the predator of choice because they are hidden, “lurking” but not always perceived. Tellingly, Von Koren’s zoologist’s language furthers the significance of the symbol when he imagines Laevsky’s interest in a discussion of spiders’ mating habits (71). The idea of the female spider consuming the male would of course appeal to Laevsky’s own sense of male victimhood.
Hanging over one conversation—the first in which Von Koren voices his opinion of Laevsky—is a “long spider web,” which here symbolizes the latent threat of Von Koren himself toward Laevsky as well as, more generally, the ongoing strife that defines life as Von Koren understands it. Samoylenko makes this observation indirectly when he observes a dead spider on a book, considering its predatory nature and empathizing with its victims. Von Koren sees the spider, despite its victims, as completely natural, emphasizing his pragmatic nature over that of the more emotion-driven perspectives of the other characters.
Nature
From the seas to the mountains, the landscape of the Caucauses is a central motif in The Duel. Samoylenko beholds the “magnificent view” (33) that Laevsky cannot yet appreciate—partly because he is right to feel threatened by it. The sea, like the mountains, is an imposing natural landscape that threatens individuals insofar as it makes plain a person’s relative insignificance. The sea-front serves as a backdrop to the conversations of human beings, which are not unimportant, but which are put in drastic perspective by a world bigger than they. Laevsky seeks solutions in the landscape, feeling that his problems are contained in the dullness of “this seafront” (48). If he is incapable of admiring the sea, he is incapable of admiring anything else, the problem being that he has not acquired enough distance from himself to comprehend his environment in any way other than seeking solutions to his own laborious human endeavor within it.
The mountains contribute to Laevsky’s sense that his environment is oppressive to him, despite the actual openness of the sea and the mountains alike. It is Laevsky’s comparison between himself and nature that makes him feel oppressed. Meanwhile, Von Koren is present in the Caucauses in order to study the creatures of the sea and the natural world more generally. His relationship to nature is inquisitive, but also hierarchical, since he attempts to control it through his knowledge. The sea compels decisions and suggests the intuitive presence of human conscience, as when Nadyezhda Fyodorovna “listened to the even splash” of the sea (190) and considers suicide. The influence of the sea stems from the sense that the sea asks individuals to put themselves in relation to a larger whole and in this way offers an important perspective—in contrast to Von Koren’s—on a common good. This common good, or simply a common whole, is less tightly controlled, and valuable in the very distance it provides between a person, their knowledge, and the world they inhabit.
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