Gryabov, a large fat man with a very big head, was sitting cross-legged •ike 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
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 furtner 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 che river. Apparently, there actually was a red-haired English g'rl, called Miss Matthews, who went fishing at Babkino, having accompanied her employers on a visit to the estate; M;sha Chekhov thought th;s story had all the hallmarks of the locality.18
In July 1885, when Chekhov took to spending days on end Ashing, 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 nshing 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 chat it had been assembled in numbered paragraphs to make it seem more serious and scholarly:
You can fish in oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, ponds, and around Moscow also in puddles ana uicches.
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 hearng the phrase: 'Do you have a licence to fish here? Or were you looking for a bruising?'
Before casang your rod, you must put a bait on the hook - whatever su 4s the kind of fish .. . Actually you can fish without bait because you're not going to catch anything anyway.
Note: Pretty young lady dachnik sitting on the bank with a rod in order со 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 characterizatons correspond remarkably well with Leonid Sabaneev's classic Fishes of Russia: The Life and Fishing of Freshwater Fish, whose revised second ed tion 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 che 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 chose hot summer days: fish magery even permeates the stoi ss 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 shooti: ig was still legally forbidden.'" '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 reg;on, Sabaneev had begun publishing Nature at his own expense a 1873, and then joined forces with the Journal of the Impei al Hunting Society in 1878. The combined ournal 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 wr'tten 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 'tfie baroaric methods employed i* Moscow n 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 ournal. He was horrified by what he saw:
The wolf falls, tak:ng with с to the grave a poor opin'on of human beings . . . It's no joke, man has brought shame on himself by this quasi- hunt! ... It's one thing hunung in the steppe, in the forest, where human bloodthirstiness car easily be excused by the possibility of an equal Dattle, where the wolf can defend itself and run . . ,28