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Literature / The Shooting Party

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The Shooting Party starts off with a Framing Device: the unnamed editor of an unnamed newspaper receives a civil servant, Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev, who is absolutely desperate to get his detective story, The Shooting Party, printed in the paper. The editor initially gives little thought to it, but once he starts reading it he's drawn in, not least because it's true...

Notable for being the only full-length novel written by Anton Chekhov.

The 1984 Alan Bridges film of the same title has no connection to Chekhov's novel.

Tropes in The Shooting Party:

  • Artistic License – Law: In-universe example. The editor catches Kamyshev out on his doing things no investigating magistrate would ever have done, including stalling for time, shoddy cross-examination, letting the evidence be washed away, and lying in court.
  • Author Avatar: Zinovyev for Kamyshev.
  • Character Filibuster: Zinovyev. At one point the editor has to remove a filibuster because it's that egregious.
  • Foreshadowing: Quite a lot of it.
  • Framing Device
  • Jerkass: Zinovyev acts like this when he's drunk, and reveals he murdered Olga just for kicks. He also doesn't care when the innocent Urbenin is sent to Siberia and might have died on the way. Arguably he acts like this all the time, though, judging by his treatment of Nadezhda.
  • Love Triangle: Possibly between Zinovyev, the Count, and Olga
  • Oops! I Forgot I Was Married: The Count with Sozya.
  • Purple Prose: Both in the framing story and in the story proper.
  • Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: The Count's the sensitive one (although he acts at times more debauched than Zinovyev) and Zinovyev is the manly man.
  • Stylistic Suck: The inner story.
  • The Reveal: Zinovyev/Kamyshev murdered Olga

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