Levitan, who had come to stay at a dacha on the other side of the Istra, he gave his brother a detailed account of the state of the fishing in the area. Like Misha,
Chekhov took his fishing seriously. He had not had much luck with a rod so far, he explained; all he had caught apart from some ruff and gudgeon was a chub. As members of the minnow family, these fish are small anyway, but this particular specimen had been so small, Chekhov said, that it was really only ready to start going to school, rather than the frying pan. He had enjoyed better luck with the special tackle designed for catching perch, and with his fish traps. Quite how seriously Chekhov took his fishing can be gauged from the fact that he had been up at three-thirty that morning to inspect the traps he had set up the day before with Vanya Babakin, a local boy who went to the school where his brother taught, and who had been doing odd jobs for the Chekhov family during the summer months for the last couple of years:
As for my traps! It turned out they were easy to bring. They didn't get squashed in the luggage and they got tied to the back of the cart. . . One is in the river now. It's already caught a roach and an absolutely huge perch. The perch is so enormous that Kiselyov is going to come and have lunch with us today. The other trap was in the pond to begin with, but it did not catch anything there. Now it's behind the pond in the feeder stream otherwise it will be put in a stretch of the river; yesterday it caught a perch and earlier this morning Babakin and I pulled twenty-nine carp out of it. What do you think about that? Today we are going to have fish soup, baked fish and fish in aspic … So bring two or three traps with you. You can get them in the fish shops by the Moskvoretsky Bridge. I paid 30 kopecks for mine, but you should be able to pay between 20 and 25. Take them home in a cab, of course.13
It is not surprising that Chekhov found it hard to write the satirical pieces on Moscow life his editor Leikin was clamouring for during the summer months, and he was glad to be given a temporary reprieve. 'Writing articles when you can go fishing and loaf about is awfully hard,' he wrote to Leikin in July 1885, 'and the fishing really is splendid. The river is right in front of my window – 20 feet away … You can fish with whatever is to hand – rods, traps, pike tackle … This morning I pulled out a pike from one trap which was as big as Albov's story [about fish], which to be honest is as heavy and indigestible as beluga soup. Not far from me there is a deep (16 foot) pool with an absolutely huge number of fish in it.. .'14 Leikin was a keen fisherman too; in May 1883, he had
given Chekhov a copy of his book Carps and Pikes, which had just been published in St Petersburg.15 Chekhov used to say that he liked fishing because it was an occupation that did not get in anyone's way and did not require him to think. He was also very good at it, and could tell just by looking at a river what kind of fish it would contain. One young companion, who fished for perch with him from early morning until late evening in the summer of 1902, remarked that Chekhov's catch was always bigger than his, even though they sat next to each other.16
It was, of course, no coincidence that when Chekhov did start writing stories while at his dacha in the summer of 1885, many of them had a connection with fishing. Sitting for hours on the river bank,
?????????
Esox ???? L. Lota lota Z.
???????
Leuciscus cephalus L.
????
Tinea tinea L.
(tench)
(chub)
(pike)(burbot)
???????????
CaraSBtus caransius L. Perca fluvitilis L.
(crucian carp)(perch)
Illustrations of the fish Chekhov used to catch, from Sabaneev's Fishes of Russia
sometimes in the company of Vanya or his brothers, and sometimes in the company of Levitan, who painted while he fished, he certainly had plenty of time to think up new stories. Back in August 1883 he had published a story called 'The Daughter of Albion', which famously depicts a coarse landowner fishing with the English governess while his wife and children have gone out for the day:
Gryabov, a large fat man with a very big head, was sitting cross-legged like a Turk on the sand, fishing. His hat was sitting on the back of his head and his tie was askew. Next to him stood a tall thin Englishwoman with bulging goggle eyes and a large birdlike nose, which looked more like a hook than a nose. She was dressed in a white muslin dress, through which scrawny yellow shoulders protruded. A gold watch hung from a gold chain round her waist. She was also fishing. Both were as still as the river on which their floats bobbed.17
When another landowner comes down to the river to find Gryabov, he is amazed by the latter's rude treatment of the supercilious governess, who appears not to speak a word of Russian. He is further shocked when Gryabov strips naked in front of the governess in order to go and detach his fishing hook, which has caught on a rock at the bottom of the river. Apparently, there actually was a red-haired English girl, called Miss Matthews, who went fishing at Babkino, having accompanied her employers on a visit to the estate; Misha Chekhov thought this story had all the hallmarks of the locality.18
In July 1885, when Chekhov took to spending days on end fishing, he thought up a story, called 'The Burbot', in which two increasingly cross carpenters who are building a bathing hut by the river try vainly to catch a burbot which has hidden among the roots of a willow. There were apparently a couple of carpenters building a bathing hut in Babkino too.19 Then there was the famous comic story 'The Malefactor' (July 1885), about a slow-witted peasant who fails to see why it might be dangerous to remove the odd screw from railway sleepers to use as sinkers for his fishing rod, and cannot understand why he has been arrested.20
Taking pity on unfortunate dacha dwellers sitting interminably with a line and a worm at the end of their fishing rods, Chekhov also composed a 'dense treatise' on fishing in June 1885, explaining to his
readers that it had been assembled in numbered paragraphs to make it seem more serious and scholarly:
1.You can fish in oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, ponds, and around
Moscow also in puddles and ditches.
