‘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.’