Chekhov was practically obsessed with fishing. His letters are studded with references to fishing–long lists of the fish he has caught in one place or another, what types of hooks he prefers, and discussions of traps and bait. More than once he asks friends and family members to bring particular fishing gear, including drawing a special hook he wants.
What’s striking about this is not that Chekhov should love to fish, but that he had time to do it. From the earliest days of his career as a writer, he was a full-time student and then a doctor. He lived only to the age of 44 but in that time wrote hundreds of stories (enough to fill a 13-volume set, and then some), dozens of plays, a novel, and an investigative report about the prison camp on Sakhalin Island, on the far eastern coast of Russia.
That kind of productivity might make sense if he were a humorless, friendless, single-minded workaholic bent over a desk in solitude, leading a perfectly orderly life devoted entirely to medicine and writing. But in fact he was sociable in the extreme, drinking and carousing and gadding about Moscow and Petersburg. He was a partygoer, a playboy, a man about town.
How did this man have time to go fishing? Somehow he did. And occasionally he wrote about it.
In “The Fish,” a pair of hapless and not terribly hard working carpenters have trapped an eelpout in the reeds, but because they can’t swim much and there is nothing to cling to by the shore, they are having a hard time bringing the fish in.
An eelpout, just so you know, is a long slimy fish with a face like a catfish and coloring like the camouflage pattern of a snake. It’s a grotesque fish. But the carpenters are excited to bring it in.
Except that they keep failing.
A shepherd, Yefim, joins the effort, but he has no more luck than the two carpenters. Then the landowner, disturbed by the commotion, calls his coachman to lend a hand. And still the fish remains uncaught. Finally (and it should be said that this story, though slim, goes on far too long), the landowner himself strips down and leaps into the water. And now there is success: The fish is gripped by the gills, and the men gather round to admire its huge size.
And then the eelpout thrashes free, and disappears.
Chekhov occasionally gets inside an animal’s head and looks at the world through animal eyes. He doesn’t go that far in this story, but he does seem to side with the fish in the battle, going out of his way to provide what would be meant to be insulting descriptions of the carpenters and the shepherd – two of the three are disfigured in some way, and the third has “a face overgrown with hair.” Whereas the eelpout is simply described as long and black. He’s the sympathetic figure in this story.
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Just as fishing was a frequent topic of Chekhov’s letters, so too does it crop up in the story after story. In “Dreams” and “The Pipe,” fishing is a sort of ecstatic activity, something a man yearns for. In other stories, like “The Malefactor,” fishing is more a matter-of-fact affair, an act of survival. But in “A Daughter of Albion,” fishing is an act of obsession, and as such it seems the most in line with Chekhov’s passion for putting a hook in the water and bringing in a prize.
A Chekhov Circus 