The landscape “The Istra River” is painted in a gentle and subtle manner, it conveys a sense of tranquility of a quiet summer day, filled with childlike joy, and, as they used to say in the olden days, “sweet bliss”. This picture is a copy made by the artist Kozlinsky in Yalta in 1954. The original was painted 69 years earlier by Isaac Levitan.

The Istra River is shown as seen from the Babkino estate, where the Chekhovs and Levitan lived. The big house stood on the high bank and had a broad view of the surrounding countryside: the village of Safontievo on the horizon and the Daraganovsky forest on the right. On the river, there used to be a bathing house, the building where Chekhov set his story “Burbot”.

This is how Chekhov reminisced about fishing on the Istra River,

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov and Isaac Ilyich Levitan met in 1879, when the writer arrived in Moscow, where his family had already settled. One of Chekhov’s brothers, Nikolay, was a friend of Levitan; they both studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The budding artist and the aspiring writer would meet in cheap furnished rooms on Sretenka or Tverskaya streets, where Chekhov would come to his brother’s to prepare for his university exams and where noisy, art-loving young people would gather. Everyone was poor and young, Levitan and Chekhov barely turned 19 — they were born in different months of 1860.

From that moment and, as Vladimir Gilyarovsky reminisced, until the end of his life, “Levitan was always near the Chekhovs. Isaac Ilyich was in love with Chekhov’s younger sister, Maria Pavlovna, and confessed that “every point on her face was dear to him”. Later, when Nikolay Chekhov and Isaac Levitan earned their first money from selling their paintings, they moved into number 12 on Sadovaya-Spasskaya Street, where Anton Chekhov often retreated to work on his writing.

The real bonding and friendship of the artist and the writer began in the Babkino estate in the Moscow region. The estate and its picturesque surroundings had a great influence on the development of both Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan. During the summer months of their life at Babkino, Anton Pavlovich wrote dozens of stories, while Isaac Ilyich created numerous sketches from life, including “The Istra River”.