Free The Duel by ANTON CHEKHOV Page A

I am inert by nature, weak, submissive; maybe during one of my better moments I’d extend a hand to him, but he’d turn away from me … with contempt.”
    Laevsky gulped his wine, crossed the room from onecorner to the other and, standing in the center of the room, continued:
    “I understand Von Koren perfectly. His nature is rigid, strong, despotic. You’ve heard how he’s perpetually speaking of the expedition, and these aren’t empty words. He requires a wasteland, a moon-filled night: all around him, his hungry and his sick, tormented by difficult crossings, asleep in tents and under the open sky—Cossacks, guides, porters, the doctor, the priest, but he alone does not sleep; like Stanley, he sits on a folding chair and perceives himself to be Tsar of the wasteland and master of these people. He persists, and persists, and persists to someplace, his people groan and die one after the other, but he persists and persists, until the very end when he himself perishes, nevertheless remaining despot and Tsar of the wasteland, just as the cross above his grave lords over the wasteland as it’s seen by caravans for thirty to forty miles away. How I pity that such a man isn’t in military service. He’d reveal himself to be a superb, ingenious commander. One who’d know how to drown his own cavalry in a river and build bridges using their corpses, this sort of boldness is paramount to any fortification or strategy in wartime. Oh, I understand him perfectly well! Tell me: why is he corroding here? What does he expect to gain?”
    “He is researching marine fauna.”
    “No. No, brother, no!” sighed Laevsky. “On the liner to here, a passenger who was a man of science told me that the Black Sea is fauna poor and that its depths, thanks to the abundance of hydrogen sulfide, are inhospitable to organiclife. All serious zoologists work at biological research in Naples or Villefranche. But Von Koren is independent and pigheaded: he must work on the Black Sea, because there is no one else working here; he’s severed ties with the university, he doesn’t want to associate with scientists or his colleagues, because first and foremost he is a despot, then he is a zoologist. You’ll see that something will come of him yet. Right now, he’s dreaming of returning from the expedition, he’ll rid our universities of intrigue and mediocrity, replacing them with scientists who knuckle under. Despotism is as prevalent in science as it is in war. This is the second summer that he’s lived in this stinking boondock because it’s better to be first in the village than second in the city. Here, he’s both king and eagle; he pigeonholes all who reside here, oppressing them with his authority. He’s got his hands in everything, involves himself in the affairs of others, he finds a use for everyone and everyone fears him. I’ve slipped from his grasp, he senses this and hates me for it. Hasn’t he told you that I should either be annihilated or sent to hard labor?”
    “Yes,” Samoylenko said, beginning to laugh.
    Laevsky also began to laugh and took a drink of wine.
    “His ideals are despotic as well,” he said, still laughing and took the peach. “All ordinary mortals, if their profession benefits the common good, keep their fellow man in their sights: myself, yourself—in a word, all people. But for Von Koren, people are puppies and nominal, too irrelevant to comprise the whole of his life. He works, he’ll go on his expedition and he’ll break his own neck there, not for loveof his fellow man, but in the name of abstractions such as humanity, progeny, an ideal race of people. He fusses over the improvement of the human race. In these terms we are nothing but slaves to him, cannon fodder, beasts of burden; some he’d annihilate or stick in hard labor, others he’d put to the screws of discipline, and as Arakcheyev forcing them to rise and retire to the beat of a drum, he’d station eunuchs to guard our chastity