A Drama at the Hunt (From the Notes of an Examining Magistrate)

1 This is where Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev’s manuscript itself begins – the novel proper, handed over inside the frame narrative that opens A Drama at the Hunt. The editor who received the manuscript in the previous section now steps aside and prints it, he tells us, in toto: unabridged, including passages he privately finds distasteful, because he judges them revealing of the author. That editorial aside, tucked into a bracket at the very end of this opening chapter, is Chekhov’s first joke at Kamyshev’s expense and a warning to the reader not to take the narrator entirely at his word – a warning the rest of the novel will make good on.

The chapter itself is deceptively slight: a hot, idle afternoon at a provincial magistrate’s lodgings, a parrot named – with the particular Russian comedy of a full name and patronymic bestowed on a bird – Ivan Demyanych, after a long-nosed village shopkeeper he happens to resemble. Kamyshev tells the story of the name with evident pleasure in his own idleness and in Polikarp’s joke, and along the way describes the secondhand furnishings and portrait he inherited, unaltered, from his dead predecessor Pospelov. Nothing yet has happened; this is characterization before plot, and it is doing real work. Kamyshev presents himself as lazy, genial, mildly self-mocking, congenitally undisturbed by portraits of the dead watching him from the wall – exactly the tone a first-person narrator needs to earn a reader’s trust before recounting, in his own words, a crime.

The parrot’s opening squawk – “A husband has killed his wife!” – is not incidental. It is the novel’s own subject announced by a bird before a human character has said a word, comic and ironic at once: the sensational plot the detective-serial reader has paid to read, delivered as a piece of bad-tempered nonsense from a caged animal on a stifling afternoon, framed by a narrator who laughs it off. Readers who know how the novel ends will hear it differently than readers meeting Kamyshev cold; either way, the joke is Chekhov’s, not the parrot’s.