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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

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First published 2004

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

Introduction © John Sutherland, 2004

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