SUMMARY:

The article reads Anton Chekhov’s The Duel as the enactment of a complex and ambivalent argument of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. It demonstrates how the concepts central to The Duel, such as degeneration, eugenics, the struggle for existence, sympathy, and cooperation, are rooted not just in the scientific discourse of the late nineteenth century, but specifically in Darwin’s treatise. Chekhov reproduces Darwin’s conceptual framework simultaneously on several planes of text, which results in the complete “Darwinization” of artistic reality. Masterfully pitting aporias of Darwin’s rhetoric against each other, Chekhov finally eliminates them in the scene of the duel.