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 serialization.
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’.