The Shooting Party

THE SHOOTING PARTY

ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 he went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Stories, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. His most famous stories were written after his return from the convict island of Sakhalin, which he visited in 1890. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote very few stories during the last years of his life, devoting most of his time to a thorough revision of his stories, of which the first comprehensive edition was published in 1899–1901, and to the writing of his great plays. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre. He died of consumption in 1904.

RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings by Pushkin, and six other volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories and Ward No. 6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.

JOHN SUTHERLAND has edited Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, William Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond and Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Finn and Rachel Ray for Penguin Classics. He is now Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English at University College London. His other publications include The Longman Companion to English Literature, Mrs Humphry Ward and Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, a collection of puzzle-pieces on Victorian fiction.

ANTON CHEKHOV The Shooting Party

Translated with Notes by RONALD WILKS

With an Introduction by JOHN SUTHERLAND

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 2004

4

Translation, Chronology, A Note on the Text and Notes © Ronald Wilks, 2004

Introduction © John Sutherland, 2004

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The moral rights of the translator and editors have been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

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EISBN: 978–0–141–90681–2

Contents

Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

A Note on the Text

The Shooting Party

Notes

Chronology

1836 Gogol’s The Government Inspector

1852 Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album

1860 Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the House of the Dead (1860–61)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov born on 17 January at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov, the third son of Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, a grocer, and Yevgeniya Yakovlevna, née Morozova

1861 Emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II. Formation of revolutionary Land and Liberty Movement

1862 Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

1863–4 Polish revolt. Commencement of intensive industrialization; spread of the railways; banks established; factories built. Elective District Councils (zemstvos) set up; judicial reform Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (1863)

1865 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1864) by Leskov, a writer much admired by Chekhov

1866 Attempted assassination of Alexander II by Karakozov Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment

1867 Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin

1868 Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

Chekhov begins to attend Taganrog Gymnasium after wasted year at a Greek school

1869 Tolstoy’s War and Peace

1870 Municipal government reform

1870–71 Franco-Prussian War

1873 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–7)

Chekhov sees local productions of Hamlet and Gogol’s The Government Inspector

1875 Chekhov writes and produces humorous magazine for his brothers in Moscow, The Stammerer, containing sketches of life in Taganrog

1876 Chekhov’s father declared bankrupt and flees to Moscow, followed by family except Chekhov, who is left in Taganrog to complete schooling. Reads Buckle, Hugo and Schopenhauer

1877–8 War with Turkey

1877 Chekhov’s first visit to Moscow; his family living in great hardship

1878 Chekhov writes dramatic juvenilia: full-length drama Fatherlessness (MS destroyed), comedy Diamond Cut Diamond and vaudeville Why Hens Cluck (none published)

1879 Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80)

Tolstoy’s Confession (1879–82)

Chekhov matriculates from Gymnasium with good grades.

Wins scholarship to Moscow University to study medicine Makes regular contributions to humorous magazine Alarm Clock

1880 General Loris-Melikov organizes struggle against terrorism Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif

Chekhov introduced by artist brother Nikolay to landscape painter Levitan with whom has lifelong friendship

First short story, ‘A Letter from the Don Landowner Vladi-mirovich N to His Learned Neighbour’, published in humorous magazine Dragonfly. More stories published in Dragonfly under pseudonyms, chiefly Antosha Chekhonte

1881 Assassination of Alexander II; reactionary, stifling regime of Alexander III begins

Sarah Bernhardt visits Moscow (Chekhov calls her acting ‘superficial’)

Chekhov continues to write very large numbers of humorous sketches for weekly magazines (until 1883). Becomes regular contributor to Nikolay Leykin’s Fragments, a St Petersburg weekly humorous magazine. Writes (1881–2) play now usually known as Platonov (discovered 1923), rejected by Maly Theatre; tries to destroy manuscript

1882 Student riots at St Petersburg and Kazan universities. More discrimination against Jews

Chekhov is able to support the family with scholarship money and earnings from contributions to humorous weeklies

1883 Tolstoy’s What I Believe

Chekhov gains practical experience at Chikino Rural Hospital

1884 Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.J.-K. Huysmans’ À Rebours Chekhov graduates and becomes practising physician at Chikino. First signs of his tuberculosis in December

Six stories about the theatre published as Fairy-Tales of Melpomene. His crime novel, The Shooting Party, serialized in News of the Day

1885–6 Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)

On first visit to St Petersburg, Chekhov begins friendship with very influential Aleksey Suvorin (1834–1912), editor of the highly regarded daily newspaper New Times. Chekhov has love affairs with Dunya Efros and Natalya Golden (later his sister-in-law). His TB is now unmistakable

Publishes more than 100 short stories. ‘The Requiem’ is the first story to appear under own name and his first in New Times (February 1886). First collection, Motley Stories

1887 Five students hanged for attempted assassination of Tsar; one is Lenin’s brother

Tolstoy’s drama Power of Darkness (first performed in Paris), for which he was called nihilist and blasphemer by Alexander III

Chekhov elected member of Literary Fund. Makes trip to Taganrog and Don steppes

Second book of collected short stories In the Twilight. Ivanov produced – a disaster

1888 Chekhov meets Stanislavsky. Attends many performances at Maly and Korsh theatres and becomes widely acquainted with actors, stage managers, etc. Meets Tchaikovsky Completes ‘The Steppe’, which marks his ‘entry’ into serious literature. Wins Pushkin Prize for ‘the best literary production distinguished by high artistic value’ for In the Twilight, presented by literary division of Academy of Sciences. His one-act farces The Bear (highly praised by Tolstoy) and The Proposal extremely successful. Begins work on The Wood Demon (later Uncle Vanya). Radically revises lvanov for St Petersburg performance

1889 Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (at first highly praised by Chekhov)

Chekhov meets Lidiya Avilova, who later claims love affair with him. Tolstoy begins to take an interest in Chekhov, who is elected to Society of Lovers of Russian Literature ‘A Dreary Story’. The Wood Demon a resounding failure

1890 World weary, Chekhov travels across Siberia by carriage and river boat to Sakhalin to investigate conditions at the penal colony (recorded in The Island of Sakhalin). After seven months returns to Moscow (via Hong Kong, Singapore and Ceylon (Sri Lanka))

Collection Gloomy People (dedicated to Tchaikovsky). Only two stories published – ‘Gusev’ and ‘Thieves’. Immense amount of preparatory reading for The Island of Sakhalin

1891 Severe famine in Volga basin (Chekhov organizes relief) Chekhov undertakes six-week tour of Western Europe with Suvorin. Intense affair with Lika Mizinova

Works on The Island of Sakhalin. ‘The Duel’ published serially. Works on ‘The Grasshopper’

1892 Chekhov buys small estate at Melikhovo, near Moscow; parents and sister live there with him. Gives free medical aid to peasants. Re-reads Turgenev; regards him as inferior to Tolstoy and very critical of his heroines

‘Ward No. 6’ and ‘An Anonymous Story’

1893 The Island of Sakhalin completed and published serially

1894 Death of Alexander III; accession of Nicholas II; 1,000 trampled to death at Khodynka Field during coronation celebrations. Strikes in St Petersburg

Chekhov makes another trip to Western Europe

‘The Student’, ‘Teacher of Literature’, ‘At a Country House’ and ‘The Black Monk’

1895 ‘Three Years’. Writes ‘Ariadna’, ‘Murder’ and ‘Anna Round the Neck’. First draft of The Seagull

1896 Chekhov agitates personally for projects in rural education and transport; helps in building of village school at Talezh; makes large donation of books to Taganrog Public Library ‘My Life’ published in instalments. The Seagull meets with hostile reception at Aleksandrinsky Theatre

1897 Chekhov works for national census; builds second rural school. Crisis in health with lung haemorrhage; convalesces in Nice

‘Peasants’ is strongly attacked by reactionary critics and mutilated by censors. Publishes Uncle Vanya, but refuses to allow performance (until 1899)

1898 Formation of Social Democrat Party. Dreyfus affair Stanislavsky founds Moscow Art Theatre with Nemirovich-Danchenko

Chekhov very indignant over Dreyfus affair and supports Zola; conflict with anti-Semitic Suvorin over this. His father dies. Travels to Yalta, where he buys land. Friendly with Gorky and Bunin (both of whom left interesting memoirs of Chekhov). Attracted to Olga Knipper at Moscow Art Theatre rehearsal of The Seagull, but leaves almost immediately for Yalta. Correspondence with Gorky

Trilogy ‘Man in a Case’, ‘Gooseberries’ and ‘About Love’. ‘Ionych’. The Seagull has first performance at Moscow Art Theatre and Chekhov is established as a playwright

1899 Widespread student riots

Tolstoy’s Resurrection serialized

Chekhov has rift with Suvorin over student riots. Olga Knipper visits Melikhovo. He sells Melikhovo in June and moves with mother and sister to Yalta. Awarded Order of St Stanislav for educational work

‘Darling’, ‘New Country Villa’ and ‘On Official Duty’. Signs highly unfavourable contract with A. F. Marks for complete edition of his works. Taxing and time-consuming work of compiling first two volumes. Moderate success of Uncle Vanya at Moscow Art Theatre. Publishes one of finest stories, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. Completes ‘In the Ravine’. Begins serious work on Three Sisters; goes to Nice to revise last two acts

1900 Chekhov settles in the house built by him in Yalta. Actors from the Moscow Art Theatre visit Sevastopol and Yalta at his request. Low opinion of Ibsen

Sees Uncle Vanya for first time

1901 Formation of Socialist Revolutionary Party. Tolstoy excommunicated by Russian Orthodox Church

Chekhov marries Olga Knipper

Première of Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre, with Olga Knipper as Masha. Works on ‘The Bishop’

1902 Sipyagin, Minister of Interior, assassinated. Gorky excluded from Academy of Sciences by Nicholas II

Gorky’s The Lower Depths produced at Moscow Art Theatre Chekhov resigns from Academy of Sciences together with Korolenko in protest at exclusion of Gorky. Awarded Griboyedov Prize by Society of Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers for Three Sisters

Completes ‘The Bishop’. Begins ‘The Bride’, his last story. Begins The Cherry Orchard

1903 Completion of Trans-Siberian Railway. Massacre of Jews at Kishinev pogrom

Chekhov elected provisional president of Society of Lovers of Russian Literature

Completes ‘The Bride’ and the first draft of The Cherry Orchard. Arrives in Moscow for Art Theatre rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard; strong disagreement with Stanislavsky over its interpretation

1904 Assassination of Plehve, Minister of Interior, by Socialist revolutionaries. War with Japan

Chekhov dies of TB on 15 July at Badenweiler in the Black Forest (Germany)

Première of The Cherry Orchard at Moscow Art Theatre

Introduction

Say ‘The Shooting Party is a detective story, first published in 1885’ and most readers of Penguin Classics will adjust their sets accordingly. The publication date locates Chekhov’s novel (his first and only full-length one) plumb in the centre of the genre’s cradle – at the point at which a clever plot gimmick, plausibly invented by Edgar Allan Poe, with his The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), was growing into one of the five big categories of popular fiction (Poe, coincidentally, can take credit for a couple of the others – Gothic/Horror and SF).

Francophiles, however, claim priority in the invention of the roman policier, with François-Eugène Vidocq’s Memoirs (1828), the autobiography of a celebrated chief of the Paris secret police. Vidocq’s book laid out the ground rules of the sleuthing genre. A mysterious and sensational crime is committed which must be solved by the skilled interpretation of certain ‘clues’. The baffled reader, meanwhile, is challenged to match his or her wits with those of the criminal – or sometimes the author. Of all the literary genres, detective fiction (‘mysteries’, as they are aptly called) is the most gamesome.

The setting up of organized police forces, with detective bureaux in London (Scotland Yard) and Paris (the Sûreté) in the 1830s was a necessary precondition to the genre’s emergence. First came the detective service, then the detective novel. The genre as we know it took a distinctive turn in the English-speaking world with Dickens’s Inspector Bucket (based on the Yard’s best-known thief-taker, Inspector Field) in Bleak House (1852–3). Dickens’s favourite protégé, Wilkie Collins, patented what would become central conventions of the genre with his 1860s whodunits, The Woman in White (who murdered Laura Glyde, and was she in fact murdered?) and The Moonstone (who stole the most precious gem in England? Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard will investigate). Then, in the mid 1880s, appeared the writer who would elevate the detective novel to a level of popularity it has never since lost – Arthur Conan Doyle, with his Sherlock Holmes stories.

Like other Russian writers of the period, Chekhov was clearly more alert to French literary influence than English although, as chauvinists will approvingly note, there are numerous allusions to Shakespeare in The Shooting Party. The most direct foreign source for the novel would seem to be Emile Gaboriau, whose series hero, Inspector Lecoq, was introduced in L’Affaire Lerouge (1865–6), a pioneering story of murder and criminal impersonation super-ingeniously solved. Chekhov refers frequently throughout his novel to Gaboriau (one of Chekhov’s hero’s nicknames is ‘Lecoq’).

There is – following Poe – a strong American input into early detective fiction. Many historians of the genre, for example, would see Anna Katherine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878) (with its series hero, Ebenezer Gryce) as one of the great progenitors and also a forecast of the strong presence which women writers will have in the field. In 1886, a few months after the publication of The Shooting Party, there appeared The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by an obscure young New Zealander named Fergus Hume. It sold a quarter of a million copies in a year (Chekhov should have been envious), widening the appeal for the genre and creating its mass-reader base.

Members of the twenty-first-century reader base have become accustomed to a dash of internationalism in their favourite reading matter (Peter Hoeg, Umberto Eco, Henning Mankell and a mountain of Maigret are all to be found on the shelves of most high-street bookshops), but they should prepare themselves for two surprises in The Shooting Party. The first is where the book comes from. The otherwise majestic Russian novel – if we discount Crime and Punishment – has never been a strong presence in detective fiction. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the author himself. Chekhov is as internationally renowned as any of his compatriots – but he is known for his drama and his short stories. Neither the achievement represented by The Cherry Orchard (1904), nor ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), can prepare us for The Shooting Party. This is, of course, an early work (juvenilia almost) dating from a period when Chekhov was ‘feeling his way to a method’, Thomas Hardy’s description of his own early foray into crime fiction.¹ It was published between August 1884 and April 1885, when the author was still in his early twenties. He was also writing for a living: as a newly qualified doctor he had to support his family by writing for pulp magazines. Chekhov’s apprenticeship, like that of many writers, was served in the depths of the book world, inhabited by hacks, bloodsucking editors and uncultivated readers. The Shooting Party was consciously designed as a feuilleton – or serial – for a low-grade (and spectacularly low-paying) journal.

The detective novel would, as we now know, prove a dead end for Chekhov, but his exploration of it remains fascinating nonetheless. As Chekhov’s most recent biographer, Donald Rayfield, observes, ‘The Shooting Party is unjustly ignored’.²

It is tempting to suggest a link between the young Chekhov and his exact contemporary, Conan Doyle, who brought out the first of the Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. Neither, of course, can have read the other’s work (The Shooting Party had not yet been published in English), but there are piquant points of contact. Both authors were newly trained doctors. The link between the physician, diagnosing a disease from inscrutable ‘symptoms’, and the detective, cracking a case by close examination of mysterious ‘clues’, is a standard observation in the history of the genre. (Whether Chekhov was influenced by a mentor like Doyle’s Joseph Bell, the original of Holmes, is not known.)

For most readers of The Shooting Party it is not so much the similarities with our familiar classics of the genre than strange dissimilarities which will be most striking. In one of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950), Mars is described as being just like earth for its colonizing earthlings except that the sandwiches have an odd tendency to turn blue. Readers steeped in an Anglo-Saxon, American or French tradition of detective fiction will experience the same disconcerting feeling in The Shooting Party.

The action of the story is set in a mythic southern Russia countryside in the 1870s. There is a strange, at times allegorical, feel to the landscape – thunderstorms are apocalyptically loud, forests impenetrably dense, the atmosphere unnaturally sultry. There is lively dispute among Chekhovian experts about the tone of the work, as there almost always is with this author. Is it ‘Parodic’? ‘Sensational’? ‘Hyper-realistic’? It opens with the ominous shriek: ‘A husband murdered his wife!’ It is, we discover, not a bulletin from some crime scene, but the hero’s parrot. It is indeed hard to take seriously a narrative which begins with a prophetic parrot call. Is the author pulling our leg? With Chekhov we can never be entirely sure.

The narrative of The Shooting Party is elaborately and ironically framed. An unknown writer (with a mysterious badge in his hat) deposits a manuscript with a publisher. The unsolicited package is, the stranger says, the record of a ‘true event’. Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev’s physiognomy would seem to confirm his bona fides – or does it? As the Editor notes:

His entire face simply radiated ingenuousness, an expansive, simple character, truth. If it isn’t a lie that the face is the mirror of the soul, I could have sworn from the very first day of my meeting with the gentleman with the badge that he was incapable of lying. I might even have laid a bet on it. Whether I would have lost or won, the reader will discover later [p. 4].

‘There’s no art’, as Chekhov’s beloved Shakespeare would say, ‘to find the mind’s construction in the face’. Unless, of course, you are a Holmes, a Lecoq or an Ebenezer Gryce. The editor also has a detective’s instincts. Kamyshev claims he is broke, and has written his ‘From the Memoirs of an Investigating Magistrate’ (also known as The Shooting Party) for a quick rouble. But the diamond ring on his finger ‘didn’t tally at all with having to write for a living’. The game, we apprehend, is afoot.

The Editor puts off reading The Shooting Party for a couple of months, until he has some leisure time at his summer villa. It is, he discovers, that most valued thing among connoisseurs of the genre, a ‘page-turner’. It costs the Editor a night’s sleep, so unputdownable is the story. But, gripping as it is, it is no masterpiece. Chekhov (typically) offers – via the Editor’s judicious verdict – his own self-deprecating evaluation of the detective fiction of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov:

It’s really a very ordinary story, containing many longueurs and in places the style is very uneven. The author has a weakness for striking effects and resounding phrases. Obviously he’s writing for the very first time, with an inexperienced, untrained hand. For all that, his story makes for easy reading. There’s a plot, it makes sense and – most important of all – it’s original, with a very distinctive character – it’s what one would call sui generis. And it does have some literary merit [p. 8].

Indeed it does.

The narrative which follows is an autobiographical account – written as a kind of pseudo-journal at the same time as the events it describes – by an investigating magistrate. The Russian legal system at this period resembled that of the French. When a notifiable crime was committed, evidence was first collected and evaluated by an investigating magistrate who combined the role of detective and Director of Prosecution. This functionary had the privilege of having all the evidence made immediately available to him, while it was still warm. He did not have to hunt it down (the police had already done that for him); he did not have to work outside the law – unlike Sherlock Holmes, for example, who can only trespass on the crime scene by permission of the bone-headed Inspector Le Strade (Conan Doyle’s little Anglo-Saxon sarcasm against his rival’s Inspector Lecoq).

From the point of view of the writer of detective fiction, the investigating magistrate has advantages over some of the traditional types of detective in the Anglo-Saxon literary traditions. Those who spring immediately to mind are the amateur sleuth (Hercule Poirot), the private eye (Philip Marlowe), the spinster detective (Miss Marple), the flatfoot (Inspector Morse) and the defence-lawyer detective (Perry Mason). The nearest equivalent to the investigating magistrate in current bestsellers in the genre would be a chief medical examiner, such as Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta.

The Shooting Party is arranged around three major narrative events: an orgy, a wedding and a murder. The crime is held off until very late (chapter xx) and – in a brilliantly conceived deception on the reader – seems destined to remain, if not forever unsolved, at least inadequately explained.

As we first encounter him, the hero, investigating magistrate Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev, is wallowing in that state of ennui which afflicts many of Chekhov’s characters (most eloquently, the drunken Chebutykin in Three Sisters). It is a cosmically dissatisfied condition relished by the great Russian writers – melancholy, morbid, self-hating and yet strangely excited. Sergey describes it with eloquent disgust:

The man who, under the influence of mental pain or plagued with unbearable suffering, puts a bullet in his brains is called a suicide. But for those who give full rein to their pathetic, spiritually debasing passions during the sacred days of their youth there is no name in the language of man. Bullets are followed by the peace of the grave, ruined youth is followed by years of grief and agonizing memories. Anyone who has profaned his youth will understand my present state of mind. I’m not old yet, I’m not grey, but I’m no longer alive [p. 41]

How, precisely, has the hero ‘profaned’ his youth – exterminated all possibility of joy in life? We never find out.

Sergey’s jurisdiction is a sleepy town, Tenevo, without much for an investigating magistrate to investigate. It is a comfortable berth, but he has no career prospects. It is summer – traditionally the holiday season, the time for relaxed attention to business. But Sergey is still chained to his desk, carrying out his insignificant duties. He is nagged, censoriously, by his servant Polikarp, a liberated serf we apprehend, who is both servile and uppity, in the way of slaves who know that their masters belong to them as much as they to their masters. He won’t have any fornication in ‘his’ house, Polikarp later informs the raffish Sergey; on the other hand he would not complain, one guesses, if his master took a whip to his shoulders.

Sergey is jolted out of his torpor by an unexpected invitation. His extravagantly dissolute friend Count Karneyev has returned from his travels to his country estate. The Count is degenerate – the last in the line of Karneyevs, we deduce. His estate, although still magnificent, is in an irrecoverable state of decay. In describing it, Chekhov forecasts – as he often does – the revolutionary cataclysm to come, forty years on:

Only the spiritually blind or poor could fail to see on every grey marble slab, in every painting, in every dark corner of the Count’s garden, the sweat, tears and calloused hands of the people whose children now sheltered in those miserable little huts in the Count’s wretched village [p. 90].

A reckoning, well beyond the time frame of the novel, is anticipated when those children will come of age and rise up against their careless oppressor. We sense it in the distance. ‘Bad omens’ surround Sergey’s ride to the estate. His horse stumbles. He ‘detests’ his aristocratic friend, he thinks. Why, then, is he going? Boredom, presumably. The Count is found in the company of a mysterious, taciturn Pole, Pshekhotsky, and his elderly, prim estate manager, Pyotr Yegorych Urbenin. The Count’s doctors have sternly forbidden him to drink. His liver is wrecked. Another debauch could kill him. He will, of course, follow their instructions, he sighs; but – as he goes on to say – he will do so ‘gradually’. Sobriety can wait a little longer.

‘Let’s have a real orgy’ the Count proposes, as blithely as Algernon might say ‘another cucumber sandwich, Jack?’ in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Sergey, like the Count, has sworn off drink ‘for ages’ as he piously says. But he has no apparent difficulty in falling (hurling himself, in fact) off the wagon with the prospect of a real (three-day, that is) orgy before him.

Once the Count has started the ball rolling by broaching the champagne, there is no holding Sergey: ‘without further hesitation I filled five glasses and, one after the other, poured their contents down my throat. That was the only way I knew how to drink.’ After which Sergey and the Count, who has himself already tossed back five glasses, set to work on the sucking-pig. Then the brandy, then the vodka, then the ten-year-old liqueurs. Then the gipsies, summoned, surreally, from the nearby town by telegram. Then the balalaikas and wild dancing. Then the girls. Sergey enjoys a beautiful gipsy, Tina, first – luxuriously – on an ottoman, then vertiginously on a garden swing. Tina turns somewhat savage when – for his third bout – Sergey transfers his favours to ‘a fair-haired girl with a sharp little nose, the eyes of a child and a very slender waist’. But he returns to his dark-haired beauty, we apprehend, for a fourth engagement. Russian orgies are full-blooded things. Blood, in fact, runs as freely as the vodka in drunken brawls and homicidal assaults, mainly against the servant class – who cannot, of course, resist or complain; it has always been thus. The sober-sided Urbenin joins in the general riot. Only the sinister Pole holds aloof. Why? we wonder.

From this point on the narrative is marinaded in booze. All the principal characters descend into what we (but not they, apparently) would see as chronic, self-destructive alcoholism. Among its other many parts, The Shooting Party could serve as an abstinence tract. Borne up on a mounting tide of strong liquor, the narrative moves to its strange and homicidal climax.

Sexual passion plays its part, in deadly combination with the vodka. Each of the three principal characters – the Count, the magistrate and the estate manager – becomes infatuated with ‘a girl in red’ whom they encounter during an excursion in the forest where they also encounter a snake in their path, another grim omen. The girl – Olga (Olenka to her friends, Olya to her lovers) – is part child sprite, part adult coquette; and complete trouble:

a girl of about nineteen, with beautiful fair hair, kind blue eyes and long curls. She was dressed in a bright red frock, halfway between a child’s and a young girl’s. Her little legs, as straight as needles in their red stockings, reposed in tiny, almost childish shoes [pp. 28–9].

‘Chekhov’, Janet Malcolm notes, was ‘acutely sensitive to the appearance of women.’³ He was also acutely aware of what attracted men in their appearance. The Count is principally drawn to her ‘development’ (her breasts, that is), Sergey to her white teeth, Urbenin to her radiant youth.

The hero, the Count and the manager (who alone of the three is prepared to offer marriage) are entranced with this child of the forest – intoxicated, one might say, were that word not reserved for their other main activity in life. Innocent as she is, Olga is sufficiently feminine to play her admirers off against each other. She gives her body to each of them in turn, until the bloody – and enigmatic – climax.

The Shooting Party is a richly melodramatic tale – so much so that it was adapted into The Summer Storm, a film directed by Douglas Sirk in 1944. Sirk, the master of full-blown big-screen romance, stressed in his adaptation the passion in the crime passionel provoked by the incendiary ‘girl in red’. But there is much that does not easily translate. The class structures in the world that Chekhov describes will be, one suspects, inscrutable to the English or American reader. Take, for instance, the cats-cradle of social relationships in the description of the wedding ceremony of Urbenin and Olenka:

Vain Olenka must have been in her seventh heaven. From the nuptial lectern, right up to the main doors, stretched two rows of female representatives from our local ‘flower-garden’ [i.e. attractive womanhood]. The lady guests were dressed as they would have been if the Count himself were getting married – one couldn’t have wished for more elegant outfits. The majority of these ladies were aristocrats – not one priest’s wife, not one shopkeeper’s wife. There were ladies to whom Olenka had never before thought that she even had the right to curtsy. Olenka’s groom was an estate manager, merely a privileged servant, but that could not have wounded her vanity. He was of the gentry and owned a mortgaged estate in the neighbouring district. His father had been district marshal of the nobility and he himself had already been a JP for nine years in his native district. What more could an ambitious daughter of a personal nobleman have wanted? [p. 86].

Let alone a penniless child of a woodcutter.

One thinks of the Inuit, and the forty words they have for snow. Our crude class lexicon (upper, middle, lower) is far too blunt an instrument for the social stratifications and blurred lines of Chekhov’s world. It is a cosmos formed by residual feudal fragments, new upwardly mobile elements rapidly acquiring the property and wealth of the neutered aristocrats, and an unregenerate and surly peasantry. One recalls the author’s own complicated pedigree: the grandchild of a serf, the son of a failed merchant (and subsequently a failed shopkeeper), a newly qualified – but not yet solvent – professional man, keeping body and soul together by writing for pulp magazines. Where, in the chaotic yet intricate society of the new Russia, was Anton Chekhov? Rising? Falling? Stuck? He could not know, of course, while writing The Shooting Party, that he was destined for immortality. To have thought so would have made him seem more vain even than Olenka.

Notoriously, Russian fiction of the late tsarist era was censored by the state. But what will strike those who know the Anglo-American tradition, particularly the prudish nineteenth-century detective novel, is the astonishing sexual frankness of The Shooting Party. On his arrival at his estate the first thing the Count (‘a depraved animal’) does is to ask his factotum, Urbenin, and his odious one-eyed servant Kuzma, ‘Are there any… nice new girls around’. ‘There’s all kinds, Your Excellency, for every taste’, replies Kuzma. ‘Dark ones, fair ones… all sorts.’ All of them, he adds lubriciously, ‘well oiled’. In nine months’ time, we apprehend, there will be a new crop of well-provided-for bastards on the estate to go with the no-longer new girls. Serfdom may have been abolished fifteen years prior to the time of the story, but old seigneurial habits die hard.

Equally frank, and equally repulsive in his sexual appetite, is Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev. As best man at Urbenin’s marriage to Olenka he seduces the bride, in a convenient grotto, some quarter of an hour after the ceremony, while she is still attired in her virginal white. She had wanted to marry him all along, Olya confesses – not that ‘old’ man, her newly acquired husband, who is waiting, expectantly, with the other wedding guests, a few yards away. Chekhov’s description is breath-takingly explicit:

‘That’s enough, Olya,’ I said, taking her hand. ‘Now, wipe your little eyes and let’s go back. They’re waiting for us. Come on, enough of those tears, enough!’ I kissed her hand. ‘Now, that’s enough, little girl! You did something silly and now you must pay for it. It’s your own fault… Come on, that’s enough… calm down.’

‘But you do love me, don’t you? You’re so big, so handsome! You do love me, don’t you?’

‘It’s time to go, my dear,’ I said, noticing to my great horror that I was kissing her forehead, putting my arm around her waist, that she was scorching me with her hot breath, and hanging on my neck.

‘That’s enough!’ I muttered. ‘Enough of this!’

…

Five minutes later, when I had carried her out of the grotto in my arms, and wearied by new sensations, had set her down, I spotted Pshekhotsky almost at the entrance. He was standing there maliciously eyeing me and silently applauding [pp. 94–5].

No need to ask what the sarcastic Pole implies by his applause. Happy the bride who loses her maidenhood between the church altar and the wedding bed. It may be worth noting that Chekhov was not temperamentally romantic, or inclined towards conventional ideas about the permanence of love. As Donald Rayfield puts it: ‘Zoologists might compare Anton’s sexuality with that of the cheetah, which can only mate with a stranger.’⁴ But even a cheetah might find the defloration of Olga, in the intervals of her wedding, somewhat perfunctory and irregular.

Judged less as an open window on the last years of tsarist Russia than as an early example of detective fiction, The Shooting Party is fiendishly well plotted, so much so that Agatha Christie is, plausibly, supposed to have drawn on it for one of her first great popular successes. To say more would be to give the game away, but readers of an investigatory persuasion can follow up the clue that the first translation of The Shooting Party came out in England in 1926. Enough said.

Another master of the crime novel, Ellery Queen, listed twenty ‘classic’ sub-varieties of detective fiction. The Shooting Party can be classified under five of Queen’s categories: the third (the ‘Crime Passionel’), the fourth (the ‘Perfect Crime’), the sixth (the ‘Psychiatric’), the seventh (the ‘Deductive’) and the eighth (the ‘Trick Ending’). One may also note, while in technical mode, how skilfully Chekhov uses the machinery of the writer for serial publication – principally his skilful attention to Wilkie Collins’s imperative: ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.’ The observant reader will also note the ‘curtain lines’ at the end of the chapter instalments, and the tactful résumé at strategic points, reminding the reader of what happened earlier and may, with the original passage of weeks between instalments, have been forgotten.

The Shooting Party is, most will agree, something more than the juvenilia of a writer already showing signs of literary genius. It is an accomplished crime novel in its own right. Like the Editor in the story’s framing introduction, few who start reading the work will be tempted to lay it down. Why, then, did Chekhov not reprint The Shooting Party during his subsequent years of fame, his failure to do so effectively dooming the work to posthumous neglect? Why, even more curiously, having displayed such precocious skill in the genre, did he not write more detective fiction?

There are no obvious answers. There is a dearth of correspondence surviving from this early period of Chekhov’s life and his motives are typically obscure, even to his many biographers. But a couple of reasons plausibly suggest themselves. He did not, as his later development testifies, like novel-length narrative. Indeed, at times The Shooting Party seems to want to disassemble itself into independent set-pieces; the above orgy, for example, could stand by itself as an early Chekhov story, as could the narrator’s perverse courtship and neglect of Nadezhda. It is likely too that Chekhov associated The Shooting Party with the early low point of his career that he would rather forget. He was paid abysmally for his novel and not always with money (on one bizarre occasion, as A Note on the Text points out, with ‘a pair of new trousers’). It was, he may have thought, hack work. His career took a distinctive turn three years later in 1888, when his long short story, ‘The Steppe’, was published in a literary journal, the Northern Herald, rather than a newspaper. He ceased being simply a writer earning a copeck per line and became an author. In his mature years Chekhov had higher aspirations than he had in 1884, and those aspirations drove him away from the formulae and clichés of genre fiction into powerfully elliptical realism. It was detective fiction’s loss.

We tend, as the British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan said, ‘to make Chekhov in our image just as drastically as the Germans have made Hamlet in theirs’.⁵ Our Chekhovian cobwebs, Tynan went on to say, having just seen a Moscow Art Theatre performance of The Cherry Orchard, must be ‘blown away’. There is no better way to begin that hygienic operation on the author’s fiction than by reading The Shooting Party.

NOTES

1. See Hardy’s late-life introduction to his 1871 debut novel, Desperate Remedies.

2. Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York, 1998), p. 107.

3. Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (London, 2003), p. 109.

4. Rayfield, p. 8.

5. Kenneth Tynan, Tynan on Theatre (London, 1964), p. 267

Further Reading

Callow, Philip, Chekhov: The Hidden Ground (London, Constable & Robinson, 1998).

Gilles, Daniel, Chekhov: Observer Without Illusion (New York, 1967, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968).

Hagan, John, ‘ “The Shooting Party”, Cexov’s Early Novel: Its Place in His Development’, Slavic and East European Journal, 9, (1965), pp. 123–40.

Jackson, Robert L. (ed.), Reading Chekhov’s Text, Evanston: Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1993).

Karlinsky, Simon, and Heim, Michael H., Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (Evanston: Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1973).

Magarshack, David, Chekhov: A Life (London, Faber & Faber, 1952).

Malcolm, Janet, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (London, Granta Books, 2003).

Matlaw, Ralph, ‘Chekhov and the Novel’, in Eekman, Thomas (ed.), Anton Cechov, 1860–1960: Some Essays (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1960).

Nabokov, Vladimir, ‘Anton Chekhov’, in Lectures on Russian Literature (1981, repr. London, 2002).

Pritchett, V. S., Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1988).

Rayfield, Donald, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York, Henry Holt, 1998).

— Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and Drama (Bristol Classical Press, 1999).

Troyat, Henri, Chekhov (London, Macmillan, 1987).

A Note on the Text

The Shooting Party was published in the popular Moscow daily, News of the Day, from August 1884 to April 1885, in thirty-two instalments, under the pen-name Chekhov used at this time – Antosha Chekhonte. By far the longest story Chekhov wrote, this novel has an unusual publishing history, since after its publication he never returned to it and it was never included by him in the Marks complete edition. Strangely, he appears to have thought more highly of the inferior detective novel, The Safety Match (1884),¹ included in both Motley Stories (1886) and in the complete edition of 1899–1901. Very rarely does he refer to The Shooting Party in his letters and in fact there is scant information about the history of its composition and few comments on Chekhov’s part.

The Shooting Party was actually completed before its serialization in News of the Day, in which Chekhov had begun to publish in 1883. In 1915 S. N. Alekseyev, the editor and publisher of the magazine The Theatre, recalled: ‘Antosha Chekhonte… rather shy, but so charming. Already a writer with a reputation, showing great promise, although he was very often compelled to write for the “cheap press” at a maximum of five copecks a line. A. P. contracted to sell his story The Shooting Party “wholesale” to News of the Day. A. P. handed over almost the whole of his bulky manuscript, written in a fine, elaborate hand, emphasizing that in the event of cuts by the censors he had sufficient “replacement stock”. At that time I was working on the editorial staff of that newspaper and that’s where I first met A. P.’ (The Theatre, 1915, no. 1702). Therefore the novel was not written in instalments, separately for each issue, but basically completed before serialization.

On 27 June 1883 Chekhov wrote to Leykin: ‘Received an invitation from News of the Day. What kind of paper this is I don’t know, but it’s a new one. It appears to be authorized by the censors. All I’ll have to do is make the typesetters and the censor laugh, but hide from the readers behind the censor’s “red crosses”.’ Payment for The Shooting Party was terribly protracted, as Mikhail Chekhov amusingly recalls: ‘For his novel The Shooting Party… my brother Anton should have been paid three roubles a week. I would go to the editorial office and wait for ages until the proprietor came up with some money:

“What are you waiting for?” the editor² would finally say.

“For three roubles.”

“I don’t have them. Perhaps you’d like a theatre ticket – or a pair of new trousers, in which case go to Arontricher the tailor and get yourself some on my account” ’ (M. P. Chekhov, Around Chekhov, M.-L., 1933).

And in an undated letter of 1885 Mikhail wrote to his brother: ‘Yesterday I dropped in on Lipskerov. He tried to stall me. I told him that I was about to leave for Voskresensk, that you needed the money and that I’d come back around the 26th. He made a big effort and gave me three roubles.’ Chekhov similarly complains in a letter of 15 September 1884 to Leykin, stating that Lipskerov had paid him seven roubles for about four months’ work. And later, writing to his brother Aleksandr (22/23 February 1887), Chekhov recalls Mikhail having to chase payment for The Shooting Party over several years and being paid in miserly sums, commenting that ‘since Lipskerov has been jailed for six months to whom will Misha go now to collect what is owed me?’

In the 1870s and 1880s, detective and adventure novels were immensely popular in Russia, both in translation and by Russian authors. Chekhov followed the trend in his early work, being a great admirer of the French crime novelist Gaboriau,³ whose detective Lecoq was a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, and tried his hand at the genre in The Safety Match (1884), partly a parody. The market was simply flooded with detective novels and crude novels of adventure, and in the literary section of News of the Day the following were published contemporaneously with The Shooting Party – their very titles give a good indication of their contents: The Parricide, by V. A. Prokhorov⁴ The Black Band, by Labourier; Blood for Blood: A Tale from the Criminal Archives, by A. Chumak; The Fratricide, signed Marquis Toujours Partout (A. L. Gillin); The Woman of Wax: From a Detective’s Memoirs (unsigned) and so on. Chekhov was extremely scathing about this cheap ‘boulevard’ literature and in the satirical fortnightly sketches, Fragments of Moscow Life, that he contributed anonymously to Leykin’s Fragments, from 1883 to 1885, he writes: ‘Our newspapers are divided into two camps: one of them scares the public with “advanced” articles, the other with novels. Terrible things have existed in this world and still exist, beginning with Polyphemus and ending with rural liberals, but such horrors (I’m referring to the novels with which our Muscovite paper devourers such as Evil Spirit and Dominoes⁵ of all colours regale our public) have never existed before. Just read them and your flesh will creep. You feel terrified at the thought that there exist such appalling minds out of which these terrible “Parricides” and “Dramas” can crawl. Murders, cannibalism, million-rouble losses, apparitions, false counts, ruined castles, owls, skeletons, sleepwalkers and… the devil only knows what you don’t find in these hysterical displays of captive, drunken thought!⁶ With one author, for no earthly reason the hero bashes his father in the face (evidently for dramatic effect), another describes a lake in the suburbs of Moscow, with mosquitoes, albatrosses, frenzied horsemen and tropical heat [interestingly, there are a lake, a frenzied horseman, mosquitoes and tropical heat in The Shooting Party]; with another the hero takes hot baths of innocent maidens’ blood in the mornings, but later turns over a new leaf and marries a girl without any dowry… The plots, characters, logic and syntax are terrible – but most terrible of all is their knowledge of life… district police officers swear in French at magistrates, majors discuss the 1868 war, stationmasters make arrests, pickpockets are sent to Siberia, and so on. Psychology takes pride of place – our novelists are experts at it. Their heroes even spit with trembling in their voices and clench their “throbbing” temples. The public’s hair stands on end, their stomachs turn, but for all that they devour and they praise… they like our scribblers! Suum cuique.’ (Fragments of Moscow Life, no. 35, 24 November 1884.)

At this stage in his development, Chekhov appears to be experimenting with longer narrative forms. In his memoirs (Around Chekhov) his brother Mikhail writes: ‘The big novel The Shooting Party was not Anton Chekhov’s first. Even earlier, in the Alarm Clock, there was printed his novel An Unnecessary Victory (1882), which came about entirely by chance. My brother argued with A. D. Kurenin, editor of the Alarm Clock, that he could write a novel about foreign life no worse than those appearing abroad and being translated into Russian. Kurenin disputed this. So they decided that my brother Anton would start writing such a novel – Kurenin would reserve the right to stop the printing at any moment. But the novel turned out so interesting that it was completed.’ An Unnecessary Victory (about eighty pages long) was apparently an imitation of the sensational adventure novels of the Hungarian writer Mor Jokay, whose works were extremely popular in Russia at the time. Chekhov’s short novel was so well written that it was taken to be an actual translation from the Hungarian.

NOTES

1. In a letter to Leykin of 19 September 1883 Chekhov writes: ‘… I’ve become an expert and written the most enormous story… it’s going to turn out very well… its name is The Safety Match and is essentially a parody of detective novels…’ Chekhov’s detective Dyukovsky shows exceptional ingenuity in following up clues: here the ‘murder victim’ is found to be alive and well. In this respect, critics are divided over whether The Shooting Party was wholly intended as a parody. Perhaps it may best be called ‘part parody’.

2. Abram Yakovlevich Lipskerov (1851–1910), editor of the popular Moscow daily, News of the Day, from 1883 to 1894, and Russian Satirical Leaflet (1882–4; 1886–9). In his memoirs, Around Chekhov, Mikhail Chekhov records that News of the Day had very humble beginnings in a one-room office in Tversky Street in Moscow. The newspaper prospered (as did Lipskerov), printing cheap novels – and even forecasting winners at the races. Chekhov echoes his brother’s remarks in his uninhibitedly satirical Fragments of Moscow Life, stating: ‘since he [Lipskerov] started publishing his News of the Day [elsewhere Chekhov called it Filth of the Day] he wears double-soled shoes, drinks tea with sugar and goes to the Gentlemen’s Baths’. And in a letter of 8 March 1896 to his brother Aleksandr, Chekhov later writes: ‘Lipskerov is no longer a Yid but an English gentleman and lives near the Red Gates in a luxurious palazzo, like a duke. Tempora mutantur – and no one supposed such a genius would emerge from a latrine.’ (The six months of imprisonment mentioned were imposed because Lipskerov, in a feuilleton in News of the Day, accused a choirmaster, N. P. Bystrov, of not paying his choristers. Although this was true, Lipskerov was nonetheless sent to prison.) That Lipskerov was a journalistic shark, quite unprincipled and exploitative, can be seen in his treatment of Chekhov regarding payment for The Shooting Party. Lipskerov also printed some stories of Chekhov’s under his full name – not with the pseudonym ‘Antosha Chekhonte’ that he used at this time, but without the author’s permission and obviously to win more readers.

3. For Gaboriau, see note 3 in Notes.

4. V. A. Prokhorov (1858?–97) also wrote under the pseudonym Voldemar Valentinochkin. His Parricide, printed in News of the Day (1884), includes chapters entitled Vampires, The Bloody Eye and so on!

5. ‘Evil Spirit’ – a pseudonym of V. A. Prokhorov. ‘Dominoes’ alludes to Blue Domino, the pen-name of A. I. Sokolova (1836–1914), authoress of detective novels. The ‘Dramas’ mentioned below refer to her Contemporary Drama, published in News of the Day (1884).

6. Reference to Lermontov’s Trust Not Thyself (1839).