To Al. P. Chekhov, 1875. Taganrog.

This is the earliest letter to survive from the Chekhov household, and Anton Pavlovich – fifteen years old at the time – contributes only its last line. The bulk of the letter is in the hand of his elder brother Nikolai, then a student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, home in Taganrog for the summer. It is addressed to their eldest brother Alexander, who had stayed on in Moscow.

The occasion is entirely domestic: Nikolai is chivvying Alexander to hurry back south, trading gossip about which of their Taganrog schoolfellows have scattered to Petersburg, Kharkov, or Moscow, and doing arithmetic on a shared furnished room. The Chekhov family’s finances were already precarious – Pavel Chekhov’s grocery business in Taganrog would collapse into bankruptcy within three years, scattering the family to Moscow ahead of him – and the letter’s close bookkeeping over a flat "with a samovar, two rooms, for ten or nine roubles" belongs to that same anxious household economy, even here in its more lighthearted register.

The letter closes with two signatures from Nikolai and a note that their mother, Evgenia Yakovlevna, wanted to telegraph Alexander herself to speed him home – and then, appended almost as an afterthought, Anton’s own line: a Latin tag, "tibi optimum et maximum," the best a schoolboy studying classics at the Taganrog gymnasium could offer by way of a flourish. It is a small, glancing thing, but it is the first sentence of his the record preserves, already showing the boy’s taste for a joke folded into a formality.