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].