The Duel is certainly among the masterpieces of Anton Chekhov's fiction and in size approaches a true novel. The protagonists are two young men, Laevsky and von Koren, almost opposites in temperament and culture. Laevsky is frivolous, while von Koren is a modern and avant-garde man. Orbiting around the figures of the two young men are the two female protagonists, Nadyezhda, a vain woman, and Marya, a totally conventional woman. The Duel is the story of a clash between two men. It is the ideological struggle between the great nineteenth-century theories about man, an immense game played simultaneously on several levels, until the final showdown.
