place
The Peschanka
Peschanka
also: Песчанка
A small river near the story's setting that Luka describes as steadily drying up and shifting out of its old channel within his own lifetime -- once deep enough for yard-long pike, burbot, ide, and bream -- offered as the shepherd's central piece of evidence for the countryside's decline; Meliton later passes its willow-lined bank on his way back to the village.
Reading notes
- The Shepherd's Pipe §30 the old channel, they call it the backwater
A заводь/старое русло ("backwater," an abandoned former riverbed) is the dry or stagnant channel a river leaves behind as it migrates sideways over time; Luka offers the shifted, shrinking course of the Peschanka as physical, witnessed proof -- within a single human lifetime -- of the general decline he is describing.