About this audiobook
An editor receives a manuscript describing a troubled sequence of relationships and a crime connected with a hunting party. The account draws the reader into a world of provincial society, private desire and unequal power. Its apparently intimate knowledge of events makes the question of who is telling the story especially important.
Anton Chekhov develops a mystery in which the interpretation of evidence is inseparable from the narrator's perspective. Attraction, jealousy and social ambition complicate the motives of those involved. As the story unfolds, the distance between an event and the account offered of it becomes a source of tension in its own right.
The work combines a crime narrative with an examination of self-justification and the reliability of a personal account. It invites attention to the choices a narrator makes, the significance of omitted details and the difficulty of forming a judgement when the person explaining a situation is also part of it.
