The Duel (Vintage Classics)

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.

   Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Checkhov, and Gogol.  They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for their versions of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), and their translation of Dostoevsky's Demon was one of three nominees for the same prize.  They are married and live in France.