Reading Chekhov

Chekhov has been called a misogynist, but in the face of such an acutely sensitive and sympathetic portrait as that of Nadezhda, the characterization does not hold up. "The Duel," as its title suggests, is about the struggle between the ideologies and temperaments represented by Laevsky and von Koren and is apparently a work about men; but its driving force is what can only be called a kind of feminism. The fulcrum of Laevsky's transformation is his realization that Nadezhda is a human being like him. He has found her in bed with one of the men she flirted with at the picnic, having been led to the place of assignation by the other: He was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin and Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what he had begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This young, weak woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had deprived her of her husband, of her friends and of her country, and had brought her here-to the heat, to fever, and to boredom; and from day to day she was bound to reflect, like a mirror, his idleness, his vicious-ness and falsity-and that was all she had had to fill her weak, listless, pitiable life. Laevsky has these thoughts sitting at a table in his house on the eve of the duel. A storm rages outside, and he remembers how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without a hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with blue eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with the rain; they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal of thunder, the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly, while he crossed himself and made haste to repeat: "Holy, holy, holy…" Oh, where had they vanished to! In what sea were they drowned, those dawning days of pure, fair life? He had no fear of the storm, no love of nature now; he had no God. All the confiding girls he had ever known had by now been ruined by him and those like him. All his life he had not planted one tree in his own garden, nor grown one blade of grass; and living among the living, he had not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and lie, lie… After the storm is over, a scene takes place between Nadezhda and Laevsky that catches the reader unawares and almost too violently tugs at his heart: "How miserable I am!" she said. "If only you knew how miserable I am! I expected," she went on, half closing her eyes, "that you would kill me or turn me out of the house into the rain and storm, but you delay… delay…"