‘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 Noveclass="underline" 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.