Laevsky in The Duel is a "Moscow Hamlet" and the scientist Von Koren mercilessly exposes him as one who blames his defeatism, his fake culture, and his hypocrisy on the age in which he lives. A university graduate, Laevsky wants his friends to believe, says Von Koren, that he had once been devoted to civilization but that it had disillusioned him and turned him into a second Tolstoy. The hard-working, practical-minded scientist declares that such drones as Laevsky represent a danger in society and ought to be destroyed, for they tend to reverse the law of natural selection — the weak prevail over the strong. Laevsky, he is convinced, will only go on repeating such base actions as running off with another man's wife, ruining her life, and then deserting her.
Though Chekhov would agree with Von Koren that the problems of the day required fresh solutions, he was not prepared to abandon Laevsky to the customary intelligentsia escape from failure. For the mutual isolation in the relations of Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna is resolved by the jealousy he experiences when he learns of her succumbing to another. It is almost as though Chekhov were rejecting Tolstoy's theory in The Kreutzer Sonata on the devastating effects of jealousy on the physical foundation of love. Laevsky realizes that his harsh treatment had been responsible for the weakness that had led her into temptation, and this knowledge arouses in him the determination to try to begin their life anew. "In the search for truth," he speculates at the end, "men make two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Perhaps in the end they will arrive at the real truth."
In response to the eager requests of two young literary friends who had recently become editors of magazines, Chekhov, in 1891, sent The Wife to M. N. Albov for the Northern Herald and The Grasshopper to V. A. Tikhonov for The North. Neither tale appeared, however, until January of the next year. Though much shorter and more compact, The Wife bears certain thematic resemblances to The Duel. There is the alienation, the same isolation of two human beings from each other, and the partial resolution that comes from a kind of spiritual experience. The tale is drenched in that typical Chekhovian emotional atmosphere, as gentle, penetrating, unifying, and poetic as the lyrical atmosphere of a Chopin nocturne. For years Pavel Andreevich and his pretty young wife had been drawing apart until their feeling for each other had become one of positive hatred. As a retired engineer and an intellectual, he had lost contact with reality in his complete self-absorption. His reaction to a famine situation among the peasantry in his region is one of annoyance. It is this inhumanity and insensitivity to people that poisoned the love of his wife, who actively organizes relief for the peasants. A chance evening spent with the sloppy, talkative but very human district physician, Dr. Sobol, opens up new avenues of thought and action for Pavel Andreevich. For one thing, he learns that the rigidly righteous philanthropy of almshouses and orphan asylums is no substitute for the kind of personal giving that come from the heart.
It is the philistinism of one level of the Moscow artistic world that Chekhov depicts in The Grasshopper, whose theme, as already indicated, was suggested by the parties at the Kuvshinnikovs which Chekhov attended, and by the affair of the hostess with Levitan. Olga Ivanovna, the pretty "grasshopper" of the story, is an elegant amateur painter who devotes her life to the search for a great man without ever realizing, until it is too late, that the simple, kind, and uncomplaining man who is her husband, Dr. Dymov, is potentially at least just such a great man. The essential vulgarity of her esthetic sense renders her incapable of distinguishing between true and false beauty. The true beauty of her husband's self-sacrificing death on behalf of science evades her, whereas the man she thinks is extraordinary, the painter Ryabovsky, can turn his poetic description of a lovely July night on the Volga into a cheap overture to seduction. But what of her husband, she asks herself before submitting? " The happiness he has had is quite enough for an ordinary man like him,' she thought, covering her face with her hands." The grasshopper's remorse over the tawdry end of her illicit romance is no less effusive than that over the tragic death of her husband, but Chekhov makes it quite clear that neither loss will alter in the slightest the trivial, superficial, and philistine nature of this passionate "lover of the arts."
The Grasshopper caused a commotion among Moscow intellectuals and rumor quickly established the living models — the Kuvshinnikovs and Levitan — of the three principal characters. Even Chekhov's good friend Lensky, who frequently visited the gay parties of the Kuvshinnikovs, spotted his image in the "fat actor" of the story and indignantly broke off relations with the author. In fact, the reworked manuscript of The Grasshopper betrays Chekhov's obvious efforts to eliminate patent resemblances between his characters and the real people who inspired them. lie always firmly denied the correspondences and pointed out the differences between the ages, appearances, and qualities of his characters and those of the so-called prototypes. But he seems to have protested too much. At any rate, Levitan thought so, and at one point it seemed as though a challenge to a duel might be forthcoming. These two old friends, despite the efforts of intermediaries, ceased to speak to each other for several years.
Chekhov's admiration for doctors and scientists stands out in these stories of 1891. In a letter to his protdge, Elena Shavrova, on one of her manuscript tales which she sent him for criticism, he delivered a stem rebuke for what he considered reprehensibly slanted characterizations of a gynecologist and a professor. "I don't venture to ask you to love the gynecologist and the professor," he wrote, "but I venture to remind you of the justice which for an objective writer is more precious than the air he breathes." (September 16, 1891.) He had himself portrayed a number of doctors in his previous tales, favorably and unfavorably. But the bumbling, infinitely kind Dr. Samoilenko and the forthright zoologist Von Koren in The Duel, the practical-minded, indefatigable Dr. Sobol in The Wife, and the heroic Dr. Dymov in The Grasshopper provide striking contrasts to the bored defeatists and frustrated intellectuals in these stories. They are hard-working, practical men and in varying degrees concerned with the problems of society. If this comparison argues a prejudice on behalf of the scientifically trained mind, it must be remembered that Chekhov's objectivity compelled him also to show up the fraud of a real scientist at this time — Professor A. P. Bogdanov.
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In a letter to Suvorin from Bogimovo on August 28, Chekhov had mentioned, in passing: "There is a famine year coming. There will probably be every sort of illness and even uprisings on a small scale." Before winter set in his forebodings were realized. Millions of peasants in central and southeastern Russia faced starvation because of crop failures. At first the government treated the matter as though it were a state secret. The censorship discouraged the press from printing articles about the famine and the Minister of Internal Affairs, I. N. Durnovo, forbade the private raising of funds to help the sufferers, insisting that this was the prerogative solely of the Red Cross and the Church.
Chekhov, like many public-spirited citizens, wanted to help, but it was not easy to do so in this atmosphere of governmental obfuscation. One had to have the courage and authority of a Tolstoy, Chekhov remarked, to act in opposition to all the prohibitions and follow the dictates of one's conscience. When this "philosopher," whose theories he had so recently flouted, wrote an article on the famine for a collection published on behalf of the hunger victims by the Moscow Gazette, a volume to which Chekhov contributed a chapter from his Sakhalin book, he exclaimed to Suvorin: "Tolstoy — ah, that Tolstoy! In these days he is not a man but a superman, a Jupiter." (December 11, 1891.) Indeed, Tolstoy's tremendous, self-sacrificing efforts on behalf of the famine-stricken no doubt had something to do with inspiring Chekhov's own zeal in the cause. In a sharp article earlier in 1891 Tolstoy had forced the issue on the attention of the public, and he had published abroad still another and more sensational article, which the Russian censors had forbidden, so that the world soon became aware of the extent of the catastrophe and poured into the country various forms of aid. Tolstoy himself organized on a huge scale several hundred food kitchens that fed thousands of peasants, and he carried on this work and raised large sums of money for the cause despite government opposition.