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.

‘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.