The Party

The Party by Anton Chekhov (1887)

Olga Mihalovna, wife of Pyotr Dmitritch, slips away from the crowded dinner celebrating her husband's name-day to sit near the beehives, seeking rest for herself and the child she is carrying, due in two months. Concealed inside the beehouse shanty, she overhears Pyotr Dmitritch flirting with seventeen-year-old Lubotchka Sheller, languidly discussing his upcoming trial before the Circuit Court for an intemperate remark he made against a teacher's complaint, and describing his longing for solitude at his Poltava farm during haymaking. Watching him gaze softly after Lubotchka, Olga Mihalovna feels sharp jealousy and resentment, formulating angry accusations against her husband's habitual posing and insincerity, and resolves to confront him. Returning to the house, she performs hostess duties—smiling at the Examining Magistrate, complimenting a young pianist—before finding Pyotr Dmitritch alone in his study, looking guilty and worn. Her anger softens into pity, and she rehearses a gentler speech urging him to stop playacting and consider going away together. But when he meets her eyes, his face resumes its ironic, dignified mask, and he leaves for the garden, restoring her hatred of his insincerity. She recalls his transformation into a pompous "Mr. President" figure when presiding over the Circuit Court, browbeating lawyers and witnesses. She continues managing the party: greeting Madame Tchizhevsky's sons and their student tutor, enduring Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch's tirade against Pyotr Dmitritch's conservatism, arrogance, and the scandal of his upcoming trial, and snapping back that she has abandoned her convictions to needle him. In the kitchen garden she watches Pyotr Dmitritch teach Lubotchka and the Bukryeev sisters, Nata and Vata, to mow, admiring his boyish charm but suspecting he resents owing his position to her dowry. She sits briefly with the pregnant gardener's wife, Varvara, expecting her fifth child, drawing quiet comfort from her. The party moves by boat to the "Island of Good Hope" for tea amid general commotion, Olga Mihalovna's smile masking mounting irritation at the guests' triviality and her husband's flirtatiousness. Rain cuts the outing short. That night, after seeing off the last guests, she confronts Pyotr Dmitritch in bed about his secretiveness and the overheard conversation with Lubotchka. Provoked, she cruelly accuses him of marrying her only for her fortune. Wounded, he retreats to the study with his pillow, and she immediately regrets the false accusation, collapsing into hysterical sobbing. Her sobs turn out to be the onset of premature labor. Amid a chaotic night involving the maid Marya, Varvara, a midwife, and eventually two doctors performing an operation under chloroform, Olga Mihalovna endures escalating pain while Pyotr Dmitritch hovers, reconciled and remorseful, insisting he never cared about her wealth or his public disputes. The birth fails: no infant's cry follows, and it becomes clear the child was not born alive. Pyotr Dmitritch, thinner and hollow-eyed, breaks down grieving that they "didn't take care of" their child, dismissing all his former concerns—property, the courts, his opinions—as meaningless. Olga Mihalovna, numbed by chloroform and grief, is left in a state of dull indifference to everything.

By Anton Chekhov · First published 1887 · Genre: Drama, Comedy, Social Commentary · 5 chapters · 15,326 words

First lines

After the festive dinner with its eight courses and its endless conversation, Olga Mihalovna, whose husband's name-day was being celebrated, went out into the garden. The duty of smiling and talking incessantly, the clatter of the crockery, the stupidity of the servants, the long intervals between the courses, and the stays she had put on to conceal her condition from the visitors, wearied her to exhaustion. She longed to get away from the house, to sit in the shade and rest her heart with thoughts of the baby which was to be born to her in another two months. She was used to these thoughts coming to her as she turned to the left out of the big avenue into the narrow path. Here in the thick shade of the plums and cherry trees the dry branches used to scratch her neck and shoulders; a spider's web would settle on her face, and there would rise up in her mind the image of a little creature of undetermined sex and undefined features, and it began to seem as though it were not the spider's web that tickled her face and neck caressingly, but that little creature. When, at the end of the path, a thin wicker hurdle came into sight, and behind it podgy beehives with tiled roofs; when in the motionless, stagnant air there came a smell of hay and honey, and a soft buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature would take complete possession of Olga Mihalovna. She used to sit down on a bench near the shanty woven of branches, and fall to thinking.

What this Textopian page supports

The Party is listed on Textopian as a novel by Anton Chekhov, dated 1887 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

Satire · Social Commentary · Russian Literature · Short Story · Comedy · Dark Humor · Class Satire · Critique of Bourgeoisie · Marriage · Infidelity · Deception · Moral Decay

Contents

More by Anton Chekhov