Anton Chekhov. The Duel and Other Stories. Translated by Constance Garnett, Project Gutenberg, 6 June 2013.

This was a freebie both on Project Gutenberg and Amazon which I decided to download because I like some of Chekhov’s stories and plays, and the libraries and bookstores are closed.

The Duel is a novella of about a hundred pages. The main characters are a couple living in sin on the Black Sea in a Russian Caucasian province in the late nineteenth century. The woman has left her husband, and they both left Petersburg to start over. Things move slowly but inexorably toward the duel of the title. Today the story is probably mostly of historical interest because we are reminded of the variety of nationalities and even religions within the old Russian Empire. We also see that social standing based on birth was still primary in the old aristocratic system.

One of the main characters is an impartial doctor who may be a stand-in for Chekhov himself. At one point the doctor notes:

“Faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse still—mere waste of time and nothing more.” (82, cf. James 2:20)

The most pointed and probably most relevant story today is “The Princess.” The title character is, indeed, a princess. The tale contrasts the way she sees herself with the way others see her. Maybe like an American from inside the Beltway today, she not only has an inflated view of herself and, simply, does not understand anyone outside her class. One line in particular should get us thinking today about how the rich spend their money:

Can you possibly go on thinking of your philanthropic work as something genuine and useful, and not a mere mummery? It was a farce from beginning to end; it was playing at loving your neighbour, the most open farce which even children and stupid peasant women saw through! (175)

That is spoken by one person who is dangerously brave enough to speak his mind. Perhaps it is something we should all be paying attention to.

“The Mire” is probably the funniest or, at least, the most ironic. Here we meet the heiress to a vodka distillery who is Jewish. Like many other places in Europe, usury laws made it more convenient for Russians to borrow money from Jews and vice versa. In this case our protagonist Lt. Sokolsky is trying to get Susanna Moiseyevna Rothstein to pay the two thousand or so rubles that she owes his cousin so that he can get married. I wonder if it inspired Fitzgerald at all.

If Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” were a farce rather than a horror story, you might end up with “The Mire.” My grandfather used to say, “Women—you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.” I once heard a character on television say, “Men—you can’t live with them and you can’t shoot them.” Somehow, both apply to this tale.

Other stories in this collection are worth reading, too. They give us a sense of the Russian middle and upper classes in the two or three decades prior to the Communist revolution. Even then, there is in many of the stories a sense of resignation: We are stuck on the steppes, and there is not much we can do about it. Fifty years later they might be stuck on the collective farm or factory, but how much had changed?