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.