Publisher's Synopsis
When you want to read in both Russian and English, though, there's a great option: bilingual books!Reading bilingual books and inferring the vocabulary and grammar is a far superior method of language learning than traditional memorization. It is also much less painful.The Duel (Russian: Поединок; Poedinok) is a novel by Russian author Aleksandr Kuprin published in 1905. It is generally considered his best work; even though Kuprin's 1896 short story Moloch first made his name known as a writer it was The Duel (1905) which made him famous. Because of it "Kuprin was highly praised by fellow writers including Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Nobel Prize-winning Ivan Bunin" and Leo Tolstoy who acclaimed him a true successor to Chekhov.It concerns an intelligent young officer, Second Lieutenant Romashov, stationed at a dull military garrison in southern Russia where he can not stomach his sadistic and stupid colleagues and military life. He falls in love with the wife of a superior officer, a cold and calculating woman whose one ambition is her husband's advancement. The affair leads in the end to the duel of the title, both externally, and figuratively through the young man's naive dreams of grandeur confronting the degeneration of military life and society of the time.Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
