Members of the twenty-first-century reader base have become accustomed to a dash of internationalism in their favourite reading matter (Peter Hoeg, Umberto Eco, Henning Mankell and a mountain of Maigret are all to be found on the shelves of most high-street bookshops), but they should prepare themselves for two surprises in The Shooting Party. The first is where the book comes from. The otherwise majestic Russian novel – if we discount Crime and Punishment – has never been a strong presence in detective fiction. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the author himself. Chekhov is as internationally renowned as any of his compatriots – but he is known for his drama and his short stories. Neither the achievement represented by The Cherry Orchard (1904), nor ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), can prepare us for The Shooting Party. This is, of course, an early work (juvenilia almost) dating from a period when Chekhov was ‘feeling his way to a method’, Thomas Hardy’s description of his own early foray into crime fiction.1 It was published between August 1884 and April 1885, when the author was still in his early twenties. He was also writing for a living: as a newly qualified doctor he had to support his family by writing for pulp magazines. Chekhov’s apprenticeship, like that of many writers, was served in the depths of the book world, inhabited by hacks, bloodsucking editors and uncultivated readers. The Shooting Party was consciously designed as a feuilleton – or serial – for a low-grade (and spectacularly low-paying) journal.
The detective novel would, as we now know, prove a dead end for Chekhov, but his exploration of it remains fascinating nonetheless. As Chekhov’s most recent biographer, Donald Rayfield, observes, ‘The Shooting Party is unjustly ignored’.2
It is tempting to suggest a link between the young Chekhov and his exact contemporary, Conan Doyle, who brought out the first of the Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. Neither, of course, can have read the other’s work (The Shooting Party had not yet been published in English), but there are piquant points of contact. Both authors were newly trained doctors. The link between the physician, diagnosing a disease from inscrutable ‘symptoms’, and the detective, cracking a case by close examination of mysterious ‘clues’, is a standard observation in the history of the genre. (Whether Chekhov was influenced by a mentor like Doyle’s Joseph Bell, the original of Holmes, is not known.)
For most readers of The Shooting Party it is not so much the similarities with our familiar classics of the genre than strange dissimilarities which will be most striking. In one of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950), Mars is described as being just like earth for its colonizing earthlings except that the sandwiches have an odd tendency to turn blue. Readers steeped in an Anglo-Saxon, American or French tradition of detective fiction will experience the same disconcerting feeling in The Shooting Party.
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 agon
izing 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.
‘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.’