The Shooting Party

by Anton Chekhov

  ‘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 seria
lization.

  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).

  The Shooting Par
ty

  THE SHOOTING PARTY

  (A True Event)

  One April afternoon in 1880 Andrey the janitor came into my room and announced in hushed tones that a certain gentleman had turned up at the editorial offices and was persistently requesting an interview with the Editor.

  ‘A civil servant, by the look of him, sir,’ added Andrey, ‘with a badge in his cap.’

  ‘Ask him to call some other time,’ I said. ‘I’m really tied up today. Tell him that the Editor sees visitors on Saturdays only.’

  ‘But he came asking for you the day before yesterday too. It’s most important, he says. Keeps on and on, he does, and he’s close to tears! Says he’s not free on Saturdays. Shall I ask him to come in?’

  I sighed, put down my pen and settled myself to wait for the gentleman with the badge. Writers who are mere beginners, and everyone, in fact, who hasn’t yet been initiated into the secrets of publishing and who is overcome with fear and trembling at the words ‘Editor’s Office’, keep you waiting for ages. After the Editor’s ‘show him in’, they’re inclined to cough and blow their noses interminably, after which they slowly open the door and enter even more slowly, consequently wasting a lot of your time. But this gentleman with the badge didn’t keep me waiting. Hardly had the door closed behind Andrey than I saw in my office a tall, broad-shouldered man with a bundle of papers in one hand and a cap with a badge in the other.

  This gentleman, who had thus managed to grab an interview with me, plays a leading part in my story, so I must describe his appearance.

  As I have said already, he was tall, broad-shouldered, and as solidly built as a handsome carthorse. His whole body radiated health and strength. His face was rosy, his hands large, his chest broad and muscular, his hair as thick and curly as a young healthy boy’s. He was about forty, tastefully dressed in the latest fashion, in a tweed suit fresh from the tailor’s. Across his chest was a large gold chain with charms dangling from it; a diamond ring sparkled with tiny flashing stars on his little finger. And – what is essential, what is most important of all for the hero of any novel or short story who is in the slightest degree respectable – he was extraordinarily handsome. I am neither woman nor artist, I don’t have much idea about male beauty, but the appearance of that gentleman with the badge in his cap really impressed me. His large, muscular face has remained forever engraved on my memory. In that face you could see a truly Grecian, slightly hooked nose, fine lips and handsome blue eyes that glowed with kindness – and with something else for which it is hard to find a suitable name. This ‘something’ is noticeable in the eyes of small animals when they are miserable or feeling pain – it is something imploring, childlike, silently suffering. Cunning and very clever people don’t have such eyes.