Note: You can catch the biggest fish at a fishmonger's.
You must fish away from populated places, otherwise you risk catching a young lady dachnik out bathing by her foot or hearing the phrase: 'Do you have a licence to fish here? Or were you looking for a bruising?'
Before casting your rod, you must put a bait on the hook -whatever suits the kind of fish.. . Actually you can fish without bait because you're not going to catch anything anyway.
Note: Pretty young lady dachniks sitting on the bank with a rod in order to attract husbands-to-be can fish without bait. Those who aren't pretty must use bait: one or two hundred thousand or something like that…
Chekhov also provided his readers with thumbnail portraits of the eleven most common types of fish to be found in the environs of Moscow. These included pike ('Eats everything in sight: fish, crayfish, frogs, ducks, children …'), perch (The males are entrepreneurs but the females give concerts'), carp ('Sits in slime half-asleep, waiting to be eaten by a pike') and tench ('Lazy, slobbering, inert fish in a dark green uniform, who will be awarded a pension for its years of service').21 Chekhov's characterizations correspond remarkably well with Leonid Sabaneev's classic Fishes of Russia: The Life and Fishing of Freshwater Fish, whose revised second edition was published in Moscow in two volumes in 1882. An unparalleled work of Russian ichthyology yet to be superseded, it is still regularly republished, and Chekhov undoubtedly acquired much of his knowledge of freshwater fishing from having pored over Sabaneev's lively and highly personal biographies of each species, complete with delicate line drawings of not only the fish, but also the different kinds of tackle to use in catching them. A few extracts from Sabaneev's voluminous chapter on the pike, the shchuka, will probably suffice to convey the flavour of this unique work:
Pikes can undoubtedly live for several hundred years. When they were cleaning the Tsaritsyno ponds near Moscow at the end of the last century
a 2-metre long pike was found with a gold ring which had the inscription 'introduced by Tsar Boris Fyodorovich [Godunov]'… As well as fish, the pike does not spare any living creature, and there is no limit to its greed: during the so-called feeding frenzies, when it is most hungry, the pike attacks large birds like geese which it, of course, cannot get the better of, and also fish of the same size. Vavilov has recorded that a pike once caught a goose by its leg and would not unclench its jaw even when it had been pulled on to the bank… I personally have often watched an enormous number of these predators catching large and small sandpipers… At first I could not understand what to attribute the mournful squeaks and sudden disappearance of the birds to, but then realized it was pikes up to their tricks .. .22
Sabaneev's vivid evocations of the lives of fish probably further stimulated Chekhov's imagination as he sat on the bank of the Istra on those hot summer days: fish imagery even permeates the stories not about fishing. In June 1885, for example, he wrote a story with a character called Nastasya Lvovna who is 'a plump young blonde with a protruding lower jaw and bulging eyes, exactly like a young pike'.23
To Leonid Sabaneev belongs the honour of being the first person to publish something by Chekhov under the writer's own name. In the summer of 1883 Chekhov had written a story, set in Voskresensk, about a peasant who narrowly escapes punishment from a local landowner for shooting a starling on his land – and, moreover, doing so before St Peter's Day (29 June) when shooting was still legally forbidden.24 'He Understood', which was actually finished on St Peter's Day,25 was too long to be published in the comic journals which were still Chekhov's regular outlets at this time, so he submitted it to the monthly journal Nature and Hunting, which Sabaneev edited. Having published a wide array of scholarly articles on topics such as the fauna of the Central Urals and the birds of the Moscow region, Sabaneev had begun publishing Nature at his own expense in 1873, and then joined forces with the Journal of the Imperial Hunting Society in 1878. The combined journal was still run on a shoestring, however, so Chekhov had to agree to waive his honorarium when Sabaneev wrote back an enthusiastic letter of acceptance in October 1883.26
As two people with an unusually deep concern for the natural environment, Chekhov and Sabaneev ought to have had much to talk
about when they met at the end of 1883. In 1876, with a view to protecting Russia's fauna and maintaining an ecological equilibrium, Sabaneev had conducted the first-ever national survey of hunting. He ascertained that the increase in the population of predatory animals posed a serious threat to the game traditionally hunted in Russia, a problem exacerbated by the overall decline in hunting with hounds across the country. Sabaneev had earlier written about the culling of predatory animals, particularly wolves,27 out of concern for protecting the traditional livelihoods of peasants in rural areas. But he certainly did not advocate the barbaric methods employed in Moscow in January 1882, when packs of graceful borzois (traditional Russian wolfhounds) were loosed on wolves released from boxes in front of an audience of cheering spectators in the city's horse-racing arena. Chekhov was there, reporting on the event for a Moscow journal. He was horrified by what he saw:
The wolf falls, taking with it to the grave a poor opinion of human beings … It's no joke, man has brought shame on himself by this quasi-hunt!… It's one thing hunting in the steppe, in the forest, where human bloodthirstiness can easily be excused by the possibility of an equal battle, where the wolf can defend itself and run . . .28
Chekhov was not by any means an implacable opponent of hunting – 'St Peter's Day', a comic skit about an unruly shooting party, which was the twelfth story he published (in June 18 81),29 was 'dedicated with pleasure to gentlemen hunters who are either bad at shooting or cannot shoot'.30 All the same, he himself was never as keen on shooting as his friend Levitan. It would be some time before he fully formulated his own environmental philosophy (he had, after all, just turned twenty-two), but his outspoken condemnation of the wolf-baiting certainly contributed to the outcry that led to it never again being exhibited to a public audience.31 Chekhov was clearly rather in awe of the Sabaneev family. Apart from Leonid Sabaneev, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world (he was apparently able to distinguish individual birds among the hundreds singing in a forest),32 there was his elder brother Alexander, Professor of Chemistry at Moscow University, who was currently teaching Chekhov at medical school. There were five other brothers working in different spheres, and in the summer of 1884 Chekhov published a short article about them all.33 In an eerie parallel to the
future course of Chekhov's life, Sabaneev was treated for advanced tuberculosis in the summer of 1897 by the famous Prof. Ostroumov, the same doctor who had treated Chekhov just a few months earlier when he had started haemorrhaging from the lungs. Like Chekhov, Sabaneev was sent against his inclination to Yalta, where he died at the age of fifty-four in March 1898 – six months before Chekhov moved to the Crimea himself. He was buried in the cemetery in Autka, the Tatar village on the outskirts of Yalta where Chekhov was to build his house.34 Chekhov has left no record of visiting Sabaneev's grave, but he kept, and brought with him all the way to Yalta, the issue of Nature and Hunting in which his story had appeared back in December 1883.35
During his summers at Babkino, when he was not fishing Chekhov went out shooting with Levitan – he reported to Leikin in the middle of July 1885 that his family had just consumed sixteen grouse and duck shot by Levitan.36 He also played croquet, treated patients from the nearby villages, and went for walks to think up ideas for the stories he worked on every morning and afternoon. His favourite walks took him to the woods to hunt for mushrooms and past the lonely little church which held only one service a year. Across the river in Babkino, its ghostly bell could be heard tolling at night when the watchman who lived in the adjacent lodge struck the hour. The church inspired two suitably atmospheric stories: 'The Witch' (1886), about the deacon of a remote church who believes his unhappy wife conjures up snowstorms and bad weather in order to lure male travellers to take refuge in
