The inspiration was to bear fruit some years later in stories like 'The Princess' (written in 1889), in which Chekhov unleashed the full force of his satire against the genteel but self-serving lady v'sitors who liked to pay frequent summer visits to monasteries such as New Jerusalem, mistakenly thinking they were welcome guests.
There was another monastery nearby that Chekhov aiso liked to visit: the much older Sawin-Storozhevsky Monastery, founded at the end of the fourteenth century on the bank of the Moscow River in Zvenigorod. In the summer of 1883, Chekhov and some of his brothers joined a group of young doctors and walked the fifteen miles or so there from Voskresensk in a day, thus reversing the direction of the famous icon procession held annually each summer. The following July, just after graduating, Chekhov spent a couple of weeks working as a locum for the local doctor in Zvenigorod. He Jived in the doctor's house. 'Half the day is taken up with seeing patients (30 to 40 people a day),' he wrote to Leikin, 'and I spend the rest of the time resting or getting dreadfully bored sitting oy the window looking out at the gloomy sky which for three days now has been pouring down horrible endless rain... In front of my window there is a hill with pine trees; to the right is the police chief's house, further to the right there is a rotten little town which was once a place of some importance ... On the left I can see a run-down rampart wall, then a little wood and St Sawa peering out of it.'10 In the evening he often visited the local medical assistant, whose daughter later recalled him sloping off into the garden to sit with a book under a lime tree that in 1954 acquired a memorial plaque.11
In 1885, the Chekhov family spent their first summer at a proper dacha - rented from the charming Kiselyov family whose estate lay on the banks of the Istra, just up the road from New Jerusalem. Ivan had been given a lift home in Alexei Kiselyov's troika after a winter party and the Chekhovs had become friends with him and his wife, Maria. Early the following May the Chekhov family took up residence in an annexe on the Kiselyovs' estate at Babkino. Chekhov led the advance party with his mother and sister. 'I've rented a dacha already furnished, with vegetables, milk etc.,' Chekhov wrote dreamily to Leikin just before he left, filling his letter with rows of pensive dots, and going on to describe the scene that Levitan would paint later that summer:
. . . the estate is very beautiful, it stands on a steep bank . . . The river is down below, full of fish, beyond the river is an enormous forest and there is also a forest on the other side of the river . . . There are greenhouses near the dacha, flowerbeds and the like... I love being in the countryside in the beginning of May. . . It's fun to watch the leaves coming out, and hear the nightingales begin to sing .. . There is no one living anywhere near the estate and so we will be quite alone . . .n
A few days later, at six in the morning, he was sitting in front of the large square window of his room at Babkino, at the sewing machine table he used as a makeshift desk, writing a letter to his brother Misha who was still stuck in Moscow. As well as telling him about the dreadful journey from the station (there was no train to Voskresensk at that point - the journey to Babkino entailed taking a train a few stops along the main line to St Petersburg and then travelling along bumpy roads by cart before finally crossing the river), and about running into 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. I ike Mi: ha,
Zvemgorod, near Moscow
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, chat 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 seriousiy Chekhov took his fishing can be gauged from the fact that he had been up at three- chirty that morning to nspect 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 domg 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 t'ver 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 w'll 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 i 11 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 mi le, 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 ed'tor 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 crap 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 hadgiven 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 d'd not get in anyone's way and did not require him to think. He was also very gooa at it, and could tell just by looking at a river what k'nd of fish it would contain. One young companion, who fished for perch with him from early morning until late evenrng in the summer of 1902, remarked that Chekhov's catch was always b'gger than his, even though they sat next to each other.16
яалим Lota Icta Z. (burbot)
It was, of course, no coincidence that when Chekhov did start writ'ng 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,
щупа
Bsox luciuQ L. (pike)
ГОЛАВЛЬ
Leueiseus eepkalns L. (chub)
ЛИНЬ
Tinea tinea L. (tench).
КАРАСЬ 0_ К Ь
burassius carassius 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: