‘Why did I marry him? Where were my eyes? Where were my brains?’

The Shooting Party, Chekhov’s only full-length novel, centres on Olga, the pretty young daughter of a drunken forester on a country estate, and her fateful relationships with the men in her life. Adored by Urbenin, the estate manager, whom she marries to escape the poverty of her home, she is also desired by the dissolute Count Karneyev and by Zinovyev, a magistrate, who knows the secret misery of her marriage. And when an attempt is made on Olga’s life in the woods, it seems impossible to discover the perpetrator in an impenetrable web of deceit, lust, loathing and double-dealing. One of Chekhov’s earliest experiments in fiction, The Shooting Party combines the classic elements of a gripping mystery with a story of corruption, concealed love and fatal jealousy.

Ronald Wilks’s new translation of this work is the first in thirty years. It brilliantly captures the immediacy of the dialogue that Chekhov was later to develop into his great dramas. This edition also includes suggestions for further reading and explanatory notes.