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.’

‘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.