concept
The Pike (social type)
Pike
also: Щука
In "A Fishy Business"'s allegory, the pike stands for the powerful, self-satisfied official: rapacious, certain of her prerogatives, deferential only to superiors, and contemptuous of newspaper exposure -- drawing on the pike's traditional Russian-fable role as pond tyrant.
Reading notes
- A Fishy Business §15 The Pike
The pike (shchuka), proverbial as the tyrant of the pond in Russian folklore and fable (cf. Krylov), stands for the powerful, self-satisfied bureaucrat or official: rapacious, certain of her prerogatives, deferential only to superiors, and contemptuous of newspaper exposure.
- A Fishy Business §21 the pike is in the sea so the crucian carp won't doze off
A real Russian proverb ("На то и щука в море, чтоб карась не дремал"), meaning roughly "there must be predators to keep the weak alert." The joke is that the carp reads this cynically self-serving folk wisdom as a benevolent justification for his own predator's tyranny.