THE SHOOTING PARTY - Anton Chekhov - E-Book

THE SHOOTING PARTY E-Book

Anton Chekhov

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This eBook edition of "THE SHOOTING PARTY" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Excerpt: "On an April day of the year 1880 the doorkeeper Audrey came into my private room and told me in a mysterious whisper that a gentleman had come to the editorial office and demanded insistently to see the editor. 'He appears to be a chinovnik,' Andrey added. 'He has a cockade…' 'Ask him to come another time,' I said, 'I am busy today. Tell him the editor only receives on Saturdays.' 'He was here the day before yesterday and asked for you. He says his business is urgent. He begs, almost with tears in his eyes, to see you. He says he is not free on Saturday… Will you receive him?'" (THE SHOOTING PARTY, 1884) THE SHOOTING PARTY is a triangular love story-cum-murder mystery novel and Chekhov's only novel. Not many people are aware of the fact that before becoming the celebrated short story writer and playwright he tried his hands at novel writing. One can witness the birth of Chekhov's unique style (although in its infancy) for which he would be later remembered for. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author who is often referred to as one of the seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. He made no apologies for the difficulties he posed to the readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

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Anton Chekhov

THE SHOOTING PARTY

An Intriguing A Murder Mystery by one of the greatest Russian author and playwright of Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters and The Seagull

Published by

Books

- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-0142-6

Table of Contents

Introduction:
Biography by Marian Fell
Novel:
The Shooting Party (1884)

Introduction:

Table of Contents

Biography by Marian Fell

Table of Contents

The last years of the nineteenth century were for Russia tinged with doubt and gloom. The high-tide of vitality that had risen during the Turkish war ebbed in the early eighties, leaving behind it a dead level of apathy which lasted until life was again quickened by the high interests of the Revolution. During these grey years the lonely country and stagnant provincial towns of Russia buried a peasantry which was enslaved by want and toil, and an educated upper class which was enslaved by idleness and tedium. Most of the "Intellectuals," with no outlet for their energies, were content to forget their ennui in vodka and card-playing; only the more idealistic gasped for air in the stifling atmosphere, crying out in despair against life as they saw it, and looking forward with a pathetic hope to happiness for humanity in "two or three hundred years." It is the inevitable tragedy of their existence, and the pitiful humour of their surroundings, that are portrayed with such insight and sympathy by Anton Tchekoff who is, perhaps, of modern writers, the dearest to the Russian people.

Anton Tchekoff was born in the old Black Sea port of Taganrog on January 17, 1860. His grandfather had been a serf; his father married a merchant's daughter and settled in Taganrog, where, during Anton's boyhood, he carried on a small and unsuccessful trade in provisions. The young Tchekoff was soon impressed into the services of the large, poverty-stricken family, and he spoke regretfully in after years of his hard-worked childhood. But he was obedient and good-natured, and worked cheerfully in his father's shop, closely observing the idlers that assembled there, and gathering the drollest stories, which he would afterward whisper in class to his laughing schoolfellows. Many were the punishments which he incurred by this habit, which was incorrigible.

His grandfather had now become manager of an estate near Taganrog, in the wild steppe country of the Don Cossacks, and here the boy spent his summers, fishing in the river, and roving about the countryside as brown as a gipsy, sowing the seeds of that love for nature which he retained all his life. His evenings he liked best to spend in the kitchen of the master's house among the work people and peasants who gathered there, taking part in their games, and setting them all laughing by his witty and telling observations.

When Tchekoff was about fourteen, his father moved the family to Moscow, leaving Anton in Taganrog, and now, relieved of work in the shop, his progress at school became remarkable. At seventeen he wrote a long tragedy, which was afterward destroyed, and he already showed flashes of the wit that was soon to blaze into genius.

He graduated from the high school at Taganrog with every honour, entered the University of Moscow as a student of medicine, and threw himself headlong into a double life of student and author, in the attempt to help his struggling family.

His first story appeared in a Moscow paper in 1880, and after some difficulty he secured a position connected with several of the smaller periodicals, for which, during his student years, he poured forth a succession of short stories and sketches of Russian life with incredible rapidity. He wrote, he tells us, during every spare minute, in crowded rooms where there was "no light and less air," and never spent more than a day on any one story. He also wrote at this time a very stirring blood-and-thunder play which was suppressed by the censor, and the fate of which is not known.

His audience demanded laughter above all things, and, with his deep sense of the ridiculous, Tchekoff asked nothing better. His stories, though often based on themes profoundly tragic, are penetrated by the light and subtle satire that has won him his reputation as a great humourist. But though there was always a smile on his lips, it was a tender one, and his sympathy with suffering often brought his laughter near to tears.

This delicate and original genius was at first subjected to harsh criticism, which Tchekoff felt keenly, and Trigorin's description in "The Sea-Gull" of the trials of a young author is a cry from Tchekoff's own soul. A passionate enemy of all lies and oppression, he already foreshadows in these early writings the protest against conventions and rules, which he afterward put into Treplieff's reply to Sorin in "The Sea-Gull": "Let us have new forms, or else nothing at all."

In 1884 he took his degree as doctor of medicine, and decided to practise, although his writing had by now taken on a professional character. He always gave his calling a high place, and the doctors in his works are drawn with affection and understanding. If any one spoke slightingly of doctors in his presence, he would exclaim: "Stop! You don't know what country doctors do for the people!"

Tchekoff fully realised later the influence which his profession had exercised on his literary work, and sometimes regretted the too vivid insight it gave him, but, on the other hand, he was able to write: "Only a doctor can know what value my knowledge of science has been to me," and "It seems to me that as a doctor I have described the sicknesses of the soul correctly." For instance, Trigorin's analysis in "The Sea-Gull" of the state of mind of an author has well been called "artistic diagnosis."

The young doctor-writer is described at this time as modest and grave, with flashes of brilliant gaiety. A son of the people, there was in his face an expression that recalled the simple-hearted village lad; his eyes were blue, his glance full of intelligence and kindness, and his manners unaffected and simple. He was an untiring worker, and between his patients and his desk he led a life of ceaseless activity. His restless mind was dominated by a passion of energy and he thought continually and vividly. Often, while jesting and talking, he would seem suddenly to plunge into himself, and his look would grow fixed and deep, as if he were contemplating something important and strange. Then he would ask some unexpected question, which showed how far his mind had roamed.

Success was now rapidly overtaking the young author; his first collection of stories appeared in 1887, another one in the same year had immediate success, and both went through many editions; but, at the same time, the shadows that darkened his later works began to creep over his light-hearted humour.

His impressionable mind began to take on the grey tinge of his time, but much of his sadness may also be attributed to his ever-increasing ill health.

Weary and with an obstinate cough, he went south in 1888, took a little cottage on the banks of a little river "abounding in fish and crabs," and surrendered himself to his touching love for nature, happy in his passion for fishing, in the quiet of the country, and in the music and gaiety of the peasants. "One would gladly sell one's soul," he writes, "for the pleasure of seeing the warm evening sky, and the streams and pools reflecting the darkly mournful sunset." He described visits to his country neighbours and long drives in gay company, during which, he says, "we ate every half hour, and laughed to the verge of colic."

His health, however, did not improve. In 1889 he began to have attacks of heart trouble, and the sensitive artist's nature appears in a remark which he made after one of them. "I walked quickly across the terrace on which the guests were assembled," he said, "with one idea in my mind, how awkward it would be to fall down and die in the presence of strangers."

It was during this transition period of his life, when his youthful spirits were failing him, that the stage, for which he had always felt a fascination, tempted him to write "Ivanoff," and also a dramatic sketch in one act entitled "The Swan Song," though he often declared that he had no ambition to become a dramatist. "The Novel," he wrote, "is a lawful wife, but the Stage is a noisy, flashy, and insolent mistress." He has put his opinion of the stage of his day in the mouth of Treplieff, in "The Sea-Gull," and he often refers to it in his letters as "an evil disease of the towns" and "the gallows on which dramatists are hanged."

He wrote "Ivanoff" at white-heat in two and a half weeks, as a protest against a play he had seen at one of the Moscow theatres. Ivanoff (from Ivan, the commonest of Russian names) was by no means meant to be a hero, but a most ordinary, weak man oppressed by the "immortal commonplaces of life," with his heart and soul aching in the grip of circumstance, one of the many "useless people" of Russia for whose sorrow Tchekoff felt such overwhelming pity. He saw nothing in their lives that could not be explained and pardoned, and he returns to his ill-fated, "useless people" again and again, not to preach any doctrine of pessimism, but simply because he thought that the world was the better for a certain fragile beauty of their natures and their touching faith in the ultimate salvation of humanity.

Both the writing and staging of "Ivanoff" gave Tchekoff great difficulty. The characters all being of almost equal importance, he found it hard to get enough good actors to take the parts, but it finally appeared in Moscow in 1889, a decided failure! The author had touched sharply several sensitive spots of Russian life—for instance, in his warning not to marry a Jewess or a blue-stocking—and the play was also marred by faults of inexperience, which, however, he later corrected. The critics were divided in condemning a certain novelty in it and in praising its freshness and originality. The character of Ivanoff was not understood, and the weakness of the man blinded many to the lifelike portrait. Tchekoff himself was far from pleased with what he called his "literary abortion," and rewrote it before it was produced again in St. Petersburg. Here it was received with the wildest applause, and the morning after its performance the papers burst into unanimous praise. The author was enthusiastically feted, but the burden of his growing fame was beginning to be very irksome to him, and he wrote wearily at this time that he longed to be in the country, fishing in the lake, or lying in the hay.

His next play to appear was a farce entitled "The Boor," which he wrote in a single evening and which had a great success. This was followed by "The Demon," a failure, rewritten ten years later as "Uncle Vanya."

All Russia now combined in urging Tchekoff to write some important work, and this, too, was the writer's dream; but his only long story is "The Steppe," which is, after all, but a series of sketches, exquisitely drawn, and strung together on the slenderest connecting thread. Tchekoff's delicate and elusive descriptive power did not lend itself to painting on a large canvas, and his strange little tragicomedies of Russian life, his "Tedious Tales," as he called them, were always to remain his masterpieces.

In 1890 Tchekoff made a journey to the Island of Saghalien, after which his health definitely failed, and the consumption, with which he had long been threatened, finally declared itself. His illness exiled him to the Crimea, and he spent his last ten years there, making frequent trips to Moscow to superintend the production of his four important plays, written during this period of his life.

"The Sea-Gull" appeared in 1896, and, after a failure in St. Petersburg, won instant success as soon as it was given on the stage of the Artists' Theatre in Moscow. Of all Tchekoff's plays, this one conforms most nearly to our Western conventions, and is therefore most easily appreciated here. In Trigorin the author gives us one of the rare glimpses of his own mind, for Tchekoff seldom put his own personality into the pictures of the life in which he took such immense interest.

In "The Sea-Gull" we see clearly the increase of Tchekoff's power of analysis, which is remarkable in his next play, "The Three Sisters," gloomiest of all his dramas.

"The Three Sisters," produced in 1901, depends, even more than most of Tchekoff's plays, on its interpretation, and it is almost essential to its appreciation that it should be seen rather than read. The atmosphere of gloom with which it is pervaded is a thousand times more intense when it comes to us across the foot-lights. In it Tchekoff probes the depths of human life with so sure a touch, and lights them with an insight so piercing, that the play made a deep impression when it appeared. This was also partly owing to the masterly way in which it was acted at the Artists' Theatre in Moscow. The theme is, as usual, the greyness of provincial life, and the night is lit for his little group of characters by a flash of passion so intense that the darkness which succeeds it seems well-nigh intolerable.

"Uncle Vanya" followed "The Three Sisters," and the poignant truth of the picture, together with the tender beauty of the last scene, touched his audience profoundly, both on the stage and when the play was afterward published.

"The Cherry Orchard" appeared in 1904 and was Tchekoff's last play. At its production, just before his death, the author was feted as one of Russia's greatest dramatists. Here it is not only country life that Tchekoff shows us, but Russian life and character in general, in which the old order is giving place to the new, and we see the practical, modern spirit invading the vague, aimless existence so dear to the owners of the cherry orchard. A new epoch was beginning, and at its dawn the singer of old, dim Russia was silenced.

In the year that saw the production of "The Cherry Orchard," Tchekoff, the favourite of the Russian people, whom Tolstoi declared to be comparable as a writer of stories only to Maupassant, died suddenly in a little village of the Black Forest, whither he had gone a few weeks before in the hope of recovering his lost health.

Tchekoff, with an art peculiar to himself, in scattered scenes, in haphazard glimpses into the lives of his characters, in seemingly trivial conversations, has succeeded in so concentrating the atmosphere of the Russia of his day that we feel it in every line we read, oppressive as the mists that hang over a lake at dawn, and, like those mists, made visible to us by the light of an approaching day.

Novel:

Table of Contents

The Shooting Party (1884)

Table of Contents
PRELUDE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
POSTSCRIPT

PRELUDE

Table of Contents

On an April day of the year 1880 the doorkeeper Audrey came into my private room and told me in a mysterious whisper that a gentleman had come to the editorial office and demanded insistently to see the editor.

‘He appears to be a chinovnik,’ Andrey added. ‘He has a cockade…’

‘Ask him to come another time,’ I said, ‘I am busy today. Tell him the editor only receives on Saturdays.’

‘He was here the day before yesterday and asked for you. He says his business is urgent. He begs, almost with tears in his eyes, to see you. He says he is not free on Saturday… Will you receive him?’

I sighed, laid down my pen, and settled myself in my chair to receive the gentleman with the cockade. Young authors, and in general everybody who is not initiated into the secrets of the profession, are generally so overcome by holy awe at the words ‘editorial office’ that they make you wait a considerable time for them. After the editor’s ‘Show him in,’ they cough and blow their noses for a long time, open the door very slowly, come into the room still more slowly, and thus rob you of no little time. The gentleman with the cockade did not make me wait. The door had scarcely had time to close after Andrey before I saw in my office a tall, broad-shouldered man holding a paper parcel in one hand and a cap with a cockade in the other.

This man, who had succeeded in obtaining an interview with me, plays a very prominent part in my story. It is necessary to describe his appearance.

He was, as I have already said, tall and broad-shouldered and as vigorous as a fine cart horse. His whole body seemed to exhale health and strength. His face was rosy, his hands large, his chest broad and muscular and his hair as thick as a healthy boy’s. He was around forty. He was dressed with taste, according to the latest fashion, in a new tweed suit, evidently just come from the tailor’s. A thick gold watch-chain with little ornaments on it hung across his chest, and on his little finger a diamond ring sparkled with brilliant tiny stars. But, what is most important, and so essential to the hero of a novel or story with the slightest pretension to respectability, is that he was extremely handsome. I am neither a woman nor an artist. I have but little understanding of manly beauty, but the appearance of the gentleman with the cockade made an impression on me. His large muscular face remained for ever impressed on my memory. On that face you could see a real Greek nose with a slight hook, thin lips and nice blue eyes from which shone goodness and something else, for which it is difficult to find an appropriate name. That ‘something’ can be seen in the eyes of little animals when they are sad or ill. Something imploring, childish, resignedly suffering… Cunning or very clever people never have such eyes.

His whole face seemed to breathe candour, a broad, simple nature, and truth… If it be not a falsehood that the face is the mirror of the soul, I could have sworn from the very first day of my acquaintance with the gentleman with the cockade that he was unable to lie. I might even have betted that he could not lie. Whether I should have lost my bet or not, the reader will see further on.

His chestnut hair and beard were thick and soft as silk. It is often said that soft hair is the sign of a sweet, sensitive, ‘silken’ soul. Criminals and wicked obstinate characters have, in most cases, coarse hair. If this be true or not the reader will also see further on. Neither the expression of his face, nor the softness of his beard was as soft and delicate in this gentleman with the cockade as the movements of his bulky form. These movements seemed to denote education, lightness, grace, and if you will forgive the expression, something womanly. It would cause my hero but a slight effort to bend a horseshoe or to flatten out a sardine tin with his fist, yet at the same time not one of his movements showed his physical strength. He took hold of the door handle or of his hat, as if they were butterflies — delicately, carefully, hardly touching them with his fingers. He walked noiselessly, he pressed my hand lightly. When looking at him you forgot that he was as strong as Goliath, and that he could lift with one hand weights that five men like our office servant Andrey could not have moved. Looking at his light movements, it was impossible to believe that he was strong and heavy. Spencer might have called him a model of grace.

When he entered my office he became confused. His delicate, sensitive nature was probably shocked by my frowning, dissatisfied face.

‘For God’s sake forgive me!’ he began in a soft, mellow baritone voice. ‘I have broken in upon you not at the appointed time, and I have forced you to make an exception for me. You are very busy! But, Mr Editor, you see, this is how the case stands. Tomorrow I must start for Odessa on very important business… If I had been able to put off this journey till Saturday, I can assure you I would not have asked you to make this exception for me. I submit to rules because I love order…’

‘How much he talks!’ I thought as I stretched out my hand towards the pen, showing by this movement I was pressed for time. (I was heartily sick of visitors just then.)

‘I will only take up a moment of your time,’ my hero continued in an apologetic tone. ‘But first allow me to introduce myself… Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev, Bachelor of Law and former examining magistrate. I have not the honour of belonging to the fellowship of authors, nevertheless I appear before you from motives that are purely those of a writer. Notwithstanding his forty years, you have before you a man who wishes to be a beginner… Better late than never!’

‘Very pleased… What can I do for you?’

The man wishing to be a beginner sat down and continued, looking at the floor with his imploring eyes:

‘I have brought you a novel which I would like to see published in your journal. Mr Editor, I will tell you quite candidly I have not written this story to attain an author’s celebrity, nor for the sake of sweet-sounding words. I am too old to enjoy such things. I venture on the writer’s path from purely commercial motives… I want to earn something… At the present moment I have absolutely no occupation. I was a magistrate in the S — district for more than five years, but I did not make a fortune, nor did I keep my innocence either…’

Kamyshev glanced at me with his kind eyes and laughed gently.

‘Service is tiresome… I served and served till I was quite fed up, and chucked it. I have no occupation now, sometimes I have nothing to eat… If, despite its unworthiness, you will publish my story, you will do me more than a great favour… You will help me… A journal is not an almshouse, nor an old-age asylum… I know that, but… if you’d be so kind…’

‘He is lying,’ I thought.

The ornaments on his watch-chain and the diamond ring on his little finger belied his having written simply for money. Besides, a slight cloud passed over Kamyshev’s face such as only an experienced eye can trace on the faces of people who seldom lie.

‘What is the subject of your story?’ I asked.

‘The subject? What can I tell you? The subject is not new… Love and murder… But read it, you will see… “From the Notes of an Examining Magistrate”..

I probably frowned, for Kamyshev looked confused, his eyes began to blink, he started and continued speaking rapidly:

‘My story is written in the conventional style of former examining magistrates, but… you will find in it facts, the truth… All that is written, from beginning to end, happened before my eyes… Indeed, I was not only a witness but one of the actors.’

‘The truth does not matter… It is not absolutely necessary to see a thing to describe it. That is unimportant. The fact is our poor readers have long been fed up with Gaboriau and Shklyarevsky. They are tired of all those mysterious murders, those artful devices of the detectives, and the extraordinary resourcefulness of the examining magistrate. The reading public, of course, varies, but I am talking of the public that reads our newspaper. What is the title of your story?’

‘The Shooting Party.’

‘Hm! That’s rather sensational, you know… And, to be quite frank with you, I have such an amount of copy on hand that it is quite impossible to accept new things, even if they are of undoubted merit.’

‘Pray look at my work… You say it is sensational, but… it is difficult to tell what something is like until you have seen it… Besides, it seems to me you refuse to admit that an examining magistrate can write serious works.’

All this Kamyshev said stammeringly, twisting a pencil about between his fingers and looking at his feet. He finished by blinking his eyes and becoming exceedingly confused. I was sorry for him.

‘All right, leave it,’ I said. ‘But I can’t promise that your story will be read very soon. You will have to wait…’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know. Look in… in about two to three months…’

‘That’s a pretty long time… But I dare not insist… Let it be as you say…’

Kamyshev rose and took up his cap.

‘Thank you for the audience,’ he said. ‘I will now go home and dwell in hope. Three months of hope! However, I am boring you. I have the honour to bid you goodbye!’

‘One word more, please,’ I said as I turned over the pages of his thick copybook, which were written in a very small handwriting.

‘You write here in the first person You therefore mean the examining magistrate to be yourself?’

‘Yes, but under another name. The part I play in this story is somewhat scandalous… It would have been awkward to give my own name… In three months, then?’

‘Yes, not earlier, please… Goodbye!’

The former examining magistrate bowed gallantly, turned the door handle gingerly, and disappeared, leaving his work on my writing table. I took up the copybook and put it away in the table drawer.

Handsome Kamyshev’s story reposed in my table drawer for two months. One day, when leaving my office to go to the country, I remembered it and took it with me.

When I was seated in the railway coach I opened the copybook and began to read from the middle. The middle interested me. That same evening, notwithstanding my want of leisure, I read the whole story from the beginning to the words ‘The End’, which were written with a great flourish. That night I read the whole story through again, and at sunrise I was walking about the terrace from corner to corner, rubbing my temples as if I wanted to rub out of my head some new and painful thoughts that had suddenly entered my mind… The thoughts were really painful, unbearably sharp. It appeared to me that I, neither an examining magistrate nor even a psychological juryman, had discovered the terrible secret of a man, a secret that did not concern me in the slightest degree. I paced the terrace and tried to persuade myself not to believe in my discovery…

Kamyshev’s story did not appear in my newspaper for reasons that I will explain at the end of my talk with the reader. I shall meet the reader once again. Now, when I am leaving him for a long time, I offer Kamyshev’s story for his perusal.

It is not an unusual story. There are longueurs in it, there are things crudely expressed… The author is too fond of effects and melodramatic phrases… It is evident that he is writing for the first time, his hand is unaccustomed, uneducated. Nevertheless his narrative reads easily. There is a plot, a meaning, too, and what is most important, it is original, very characteristic and what may be called sui generis. It also possesses certain literary qualities. It is worth reading. Here it is.

CHAPTERI

Table of Contents

‘The husband killed his wife! Oh, how stupid you are! Give me some sugar!’

These cries awoke me. I stretched myself, feeling indisposition and heaviness in every limb. One can lie upon one’s legs or arms until they are numb, but now it seemed to me that my whole body, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, was benumbed. An afternoon snooze in a sultry, dry atmosphere amid the buzzing and humming of flies and mosquitoes does not act in an invigorating manner but has an enervating effect. Broken and bathed in perspiration, I rose and went to the window. The sun was still high and baked with the same ardour it had done three hours before. Many hours still remained until sunset and the coolness of evening.

‘The husband killed his wife!’

‘Stop lying, Ivan Dem’yanych!’ I said as I gave a slight tap to Ivan Dem’yanych’s nose. ‘Husbands kill their wives only in novels and in the tropics, where African passions boil over, my dear. For us such horrors as thefts and burglaries or people living on false passports are quite enough.’

‘Thefts and burglaries!’ Ivan Dem’yanych murmured through his hooked nose. ‘Oh, how stupid you are!’

‘What’s to be done, my dear? In what way are we mortals to blame for our brain having its limits? Besides, Ivan Dem’yanych, it is no sin to be a fool in such a temperature. You’re my clever darling, but doubtless your brain, too, gets addled and stupid in such heat.’

My parrot is not called Polly or by any other of the names given to birds, but he is called Ivan Dem’yanych. He got this name quite by chance. One day, when my man Polycarp was cleaning the cage, he suddenly made a discovery without which my noble bird would still have been called Polly. My lazy servant was suddenly blessed with the idea that my parrot’s beak was very like the nose of our village shopkeeper, Ivan Dem’yanych, and from that time the name and patronymic of our long-nosed shopkeeper stuck to my parrot. From that day Polycarp and the whole village christened my extraordinary bird ‘Ivan Dem’yanych’. Thanks to Polycarp the bird became a personage, and the shopkeeper lost his own name, and to the end of his days he will be known among the villagers by the nickname of the ‘magistrate’s parrot’.

I had bought Ivan Dem’yanych from the mother of my predecessor, the examining magistrate, Pospelov, who had died shortly before my appointment. I bought him together with some old oak furniture, various rubbishy kitchen utensils, and in general the whole of the household goods that remained after Pospelov’s death. My walls are still decorated with photographs of his relatives, and the portrait of the former occupant is still hanging above my bed. The departed, a lean, muscular man with a red moustache and a thick under-lip, sits looking at me with staring eyes from his faded nutwood frame all the time I am lying on his bed… I had not taken down a single photograph, I had left the house just as I found it. I am too lazy to think of my own comfort, and I don’t prevent either corpses or living men from hanging on my walls if the latter wish to do so.

Ivan Dem’yanych found it as sultry as I did. He fluffed out his feathers, spread his wings, and shrieked out the phrases he had been taught by my predecessor, Pospelov, and by Polycarp. To occupy in some way my after-dinner leisure, I sat down in front of the cage and began to watch the movements of my parrot, who was industriously trying, but without success, to escape from the torments he suffered from the suffocating heat and the insects that dwelt among his feathers… The poor thing seemed very unhappy…

‘At what time does he awake?’ was borne to me in a bass voice from the lobby.

‘That depends!’ Polycarp’s voice answered. ‘Sometimes he wakes at five o’clock, and sometimes he sleeps like a log till morning… Everybody knows he has nothing to do.’

‘You’re his valet, I suppose?’

‘His servant. Now don’t bother me; hold your tongue. Don’t you see I’m reading?’

I peeped into the lobby. My Polycarp was there, lolling on the large red trunk, and, as usual, reading a book. With his sleepy, unblinking eyes fixed attentively on his book, he was moving his lips and frowning. He was evidently irritated by the presence of the stranger, a tall, bearded muzhik, who was standing near the trunk persistently trying to inveigle him into conversation. At my appearance the muzhik took a step away from the trunk and drew himself up to attention. Polycarp looked dissatisfied, and without removing his eyes from the book he rose slightly.

‘What do you want?’ I asked the muzhik.

‘I have come from the Count, your honour. The Count sends you his greetings, and begs you to come to him at once…’

‘Has the Count arrived?’ I asked, much astonished.

‘Just so, your honour… He arrived last night… Here’s a letter, sir…’

‘What the devil has brought him back!’ my Polycarp grumbled. ‘Two summers we’ve lived peacefully without him and this year he’ll again make a pigsty of the district. It reflects on us, it’s shameful.’

‘Hold your tongue, your opinion is not asked!’

‘I need not be asked… You’ll come home drunk again, and go in the lake just as you are, in all your clothes… It’s I who have the job of cleaning them afterwards! And it takes three days and more!’

‘What’s the Count doing now?’ I asked the muzhik.

‘He was just sitting down to dinner when he sent me to you… Before dinner he was fishing from the bathing cabin, sir… What answer can I take?’

I opened the letter and read the following:

My Dear Lecoq,

If you are still alive, well, and have not forgotten your ever-drunken friend, do not delay a moment. Get dressed immediately and come to me. I only arrived last night and am already dying from ennui. The impatience I feel to see you knows no bounds. I wanted to drive over to see you and carry you off to my den, but the heat has utterly exhausted me. I simply sit about, fanning myself. Well, how are you? How is your clever Ivan Dem’yanych? Are you still at war with your scolding Polycarp? Come quickly and tell me everything.

Your A. K.

It was not necessary to look at the signature to recognize the drunken, sprawling, ugly handwriting of my friend, Count Alexey Karnéev. The shortness of the letter, its pretension to a certain playfulness and vivacity proved that my friend, with his limited capacities, must have torn up much notepaper before he was able to compose this epistle.

The pronoun ‘which’ was absent from this letter, and adverbs were carefully avoided - both being grammatical forms that were seldom achieved by the Count at a single sitting. ‘What answer can I take, sir?’ the muzhik repeated. At first I did not reply to this question, and every decent, honest man in my place would have hesitated too. The Count was fond of me, and quite sincerely obtruded his friendship on me. I, on my part, felt nothing like friendship for the Count; I even disliked him. It would therefore have been more honest to reject his friendship once for all than to go to him and dissimulate. Besides, to go to the Count’s meant to plunge once more into the life my Polycarp had characterized as a ‘pigsty’, which two years before during the Count’s residence on his estate and until he left for Petersburg had injured my health and dried up my brain. That loose, unaccustomed life so full of show and drunken madness, had not yet shattered my constitution, but it had made me known throughout the province… Yet I was popular…

My reason told me the whole truth, a blush of shame for the not distant past suffused my face, my heart sank with fear that I would not possess sufficient manliness to refuse to go to the Count’s, but I did not hesitate long. The struggle lasted not more than a minute.

‘Give my compliments to the Count,’ I said to his messenger, ‘and thank him for thinking of me… Tell him I am busy, and that… Tell him that I…’

And at the very moment my tongue was about to pronounce a decisive ‘No’, I was suddenly overpowered by a feeling of dullness… Here I was, a young man, full of life, strength and desires, who by the decrees of fate had been cast into this forest village, seized by a sensation of ennui, of loneliness…

I remembered the Count’s gardens with the exuberant vegetation of their cool conservatories, and the semi-darkness of the narrow, neglected avenues… Those avenues protected from the sun by arches of the entwined branches of old limes know me well; they also know the women who sought my love in semi-darkness… I remembered the luxurious drawing-room with the sweet indolence of its velvet sofas, heavy curtains and thick carpets, soft as down, with the laziness so common to young healthy animals… I recalled my drunken audacity, limitless in its scope, its satanic pride and its contempt for life. My large body wearied by sleep again longed for movement…

‘Tell him I’ll come!’

The muzhik bowed and retired.

‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let that devil in!’ Polycarp grumbled, quickly turning over the pages of his book in a purposeless manner.

‘Put that book away and go and saddle Zorka,’ I said. ‘Look sharp!’

‘Look sharp! Oh, of course, certainly… I’m just going to rush off… It would be all right if he were going on business, but he’s just off on some spree!’

This was said in an undertone, but loud enough for me to hear it. Having whispered this impertinence, my servant drew himself up before me and waited for me to flare up in reply, but I pretended not to have heard his words. My silence was the best and sharpest weapon I could use in my contests with Polycarp. This contemptuous custom of allowing his venomous words to pass unheeded disarmed him and cut the ground away from under his feet. As a punishment it acted better than a box on the ear or a flood of vituperation… When Polycarp had gone into the yard to saddle Zorka, I peeped into the book which he had been prevented from reading. It was The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas’ dreadful romance… My civilized fool read everything, beginning with the signboards of the public houses and finishing with Auguste Comte, which was lying in my trunk together with other neglected books that I did not read; but of the whole mass of written and printed matter he only approved of exciting, sensational novels with ‘celebrated personages’, poison and subterranean passages; all the rest he dubbed ‘nonsense’. I shall have again to refer to his reading, now I had to ride off. A quarter of an hour later the hoofs of my Zorka were raising the dust on the road from the village to the Count’s estate. The sun was near setting, but the heat and the sultriness were still felt. The hot air was dry and motionless, although my road led along the banks of an enormous lake… On my right I saw the great expanse of water, on the left my sight was caressed by the young vernal foliage of an oak forest; nevertheless, my cheeks suffered the dryness of Sahara, if there could only be a storm!’ I thought, dreaming of a good cool downpour.

The lake slept peacefully. It did not greet with a single sound the flight of my Zorka, and it was only the piping of a young snipe that broke the grave-like silence of the sleeping lake. The sun looked at itself in it as in a huge mirror, and shed a blinding light on the whole of its breadth that extended from my road to the distant banks opposite. And it seemed to my blinded eyes that nature received light from the lake and not from the sun.

The sultriness impelled to slumber the whole of that life in which the lake and its green banks so richly abounded. The birds had hidden themselves, the fish did not splash in the water, the field crickets and the grasshoppers waited in silence for coolness to set in. All around was a waste. From time to time my Zorka bore me into a thick cloud of mosquitoes along the bank of the lake, and far away on the water, scarcely moving, I could see the three black boats belonging to old Mikhey, our fisherman, who leased the fishing rights of the whole lake.

CHAPTERII

Table of Contents

I did not ride in a straight line as I had to make a circuit along the road that skirted the circular lake. It was only possible to go in a straight line by boat, while those who went by the road had to make a large detour, the distance being almost eight versts farther. All the way, looking across the lake, I could see beyond it the muddy banks opposite, on which the bright strip of a blossoming cherry orchard gleamed white, while farther still I could see the roofs of the Count’s barns dotted all over with many coloured pigeons, and rising still higher the small white belfry of the Count’s chapel. At the foot of the muddy banks was the bathing cabin with sailcloth nailed on the sides and sheets hanging to dry on its railings. I saw all this, and it appeared to me as if only a verst separated me from my friend the Count, yet in order to reach his estate I had to ride about sixteen versts.

On the way, I thought of my strange relationship with the Count. I was interested in examining and trying to define it, but the task proved beyond me. However much I thought, I could come to no satisfactory decision, and at last I arrived at the conclusion that I was a bad judge of myself and of men in general. The people who knew both the Count and me had an explanation for our mutual connection. The narrower-minded, who see nothing beyond the tip of their nose, were fond of asserting that the illustrious Count found in the ‘poor and undistinguished’ magistrate a congenial hanger-on and boon companion. In their view I, the writer of these lines, fawned and cringed before the Count for the sake of the crumbs and scraps that fell from his table. In their opinion the illustrious millionaire, who was both the bugbear and the envy of the whole of the S — district, was very clever and liberal; otherwise his gracious condescension that went as far as friendship for an indigent magistrate and the genuine liberalism that made the Count tolerate my familiarity in addressing him as ‘thou’, would be quite incomprehensible. Cleverer people ex-

plained our intimacy by our common ‘spiritual interests’. The Count and I were of the same age. We had finished our law studies in the same university, and we both knew very little: I still had a smattering of legal lore, but the Count had forgotten and drowned in alcohol the little he had ever known. We were both proud, and by virtue of some reason which was only known to ourselves, we shunned the world like misanthropes. We were both indifferent to the opinion of the world - that is of the S — district - we were both immoral, and would certainly both end badly. These were the ‘spiritual interests’ that united us. This was all that the people who knew us could say about our relations.