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One of Chekhov's favorite plots in his early stories involves a clash between two kinds of characters, one sensitive, excitable, and desperate for recognition, the other reserved and emotionally inaccessible. When the little clerk, Chervyakov, in "Death of a Civil Servant" ("Smert' chinovnika," 1883), sneezes on an important general, the general is unperturbed and hardly notices the offense. Chervyakov, however, is horrified by the audacity of his act, and he apologizes profusely, mystified and alarmed by the general's indifference. Eventually, on his sixth apology, he succeeds in irritating the general and eliciting the rebuke "Get lost!" (Poshel von!), which causes the overwrought Chervyakov to die from terror and humiliation. 1 Something in the dynamic between these two characters-something more basic than the social power imbalance that divides thempersistently reemerges as a psychological pattern among Chekhov's many characterizations. From the early 1880s onward these two individuals keep attempting to communicate-one trembling, weeping, and struggling for justice within an enclosed sphere of concerns, while the other observes the comedy, without much interest, from outside. This article will examine how the simple dramatic conflict between engaged and detached characters in many of the early stories anticipates a more philosophically complex psychological dualism that appears in the stories of the 1890s. 2 Through an analysis of these "enemies"-first as distinct characters in conflict and then as warring identities within the individual-I shall examine how Chekhov conceived of a complex architecture for the self over the span of his career, how these attitudes in conflict in his early works initiate a meditation on the nature of compassion and the problem of the structure of the human personality. By following the development of this conflict, we can observe how Chekhov engaged and reenvisioned the larger European tradition of psychological dualism and personal fragmentation that he inherited at the end of the nineteenth century.

By tracing a pattern through Fedor Dostoevskii's early stories–especially The Double, “The Landlady,” and Netochka Nezvanova–in which characters are bound to each other as interacting aspects of a larger personality, Yuri Corrigan explores the problem of individual identity. Entering into debate with classical studies of the self in Dostoevskii from Mikhail Bakhtin to Nikolai Berdiaev, Corrigan explores how the active suppression of memory and interiority in Dostoevskii's early characters gives rise to the mechanism of intersecting selves, in which the inner architecture of one personality is extended throughout numerous consciousnesses. Through an analysis of these relationships, Corrigan examines how Dostoevskii synthesizes two traditions of doubling in his early writing–the “cognitive” dualism of self-consciousness and the “psychic” dualism of the unconscious–to form a tripartite model of personality that will be important for his later novels.

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