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.

A story of concealed love and fatal jealousy wrapped into a classic murder mystery

When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called to investigate. But suspicion descends upon virtually everyone, for, as we soon learn, the victim was at the center of a tangled web of relationships with her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the magistrate himself. One of Anton Chekhov's earliest experiments in fiction, The Shooting Party prefigures the mature style he would develop in his magnificent stories and plays.

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