The Duel

Very similiar to Fathers & Sons in a way. What I like is it sets the scene of these two ideas - which appear to you, as if so self-evident, so logical, so thorough. And those who espouse them have no modesty or humility - to either the possibility that they cannot possibly hope to exhaustively define the entire human experience, nor what the consequences of implementation of their doctrines require. (just look to the Russian revolution)

The duel this dramatizes is among the many conflict of ideas between the Russian intelligentsia in 19th century.
First, the liberal idealism of the 1840s.
Second, the rational egoism of the 1860s, who here, takes the form of Laevsky. A self-styled “superfluous man” (the very kind christened by Turgenev in 1850) and von Koren, a zoologist, and Social Darwinian with a fittingly German name. These are the spiritual Fathers of communism - which arrives in Russia and is received as the sociological, enlightenment equivalent of what Darwinism was for biology.

The closing line - “no one knows the real truth”.