To M. M. Chekhov, 25 August 1877. Taganrog.
M. M. Чехову, 25 августа 1877 г. Таганрог.
Headnote
Written on 25 August 1877 from Taganrog, this is one of Chekhov’s earliest surviving letters – he was seventeen. The addressee, Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov, was not one of the writer’s own brothers but a cousin once removed on his father’s side, a Moscow merchant’s clerk of about Chekhov’s own generation; the family called him Misha, as they did Chekhov’s younger brother Mikhail Pavlovich, and the two are easily confused in translation without the patronymic on the envelope to sort them. By 1877 the Chekhov household in Taganrog had effectively broken apart: Pavel Yegorovich’s shop had failed the year before, the family had fled its creditors to Moscow, and Anton, still finishing school, had been left behind alone in the mortgaged house to sell off the furniture and fend for himself on almost no money – the period he would later describe as an education in want.
The letter’s business is small and entirely practical: a favor asked on behalf of a poorer relation, a Taganrog boy adrift for lack of means and looking for a place as a shop boy, ideally with a merchant named Gavrilov. The seventeen-year-old’s tone is already recognisable – courteous, direct, careful not to presume on his cousin’s generosity, and quick to acknowledge the imposition even as he presses for it. "I know this and say it frankly, putting myself in your place" is a schoolboy’s sentence, but it is also the first flicker of the exact, unsentimental fairness that runs through Chekhov’s mature correspondence and his fiction alike.
The closing lines carry the letter’s real weight lightly: greetings to a sister and brother-in-law, a wish for money enough to bring the family together at Christmas, and the address on the back in the hand of a provincial post office. Nothing here announces a career. But the same discipline of the concrete over the sentimental – naming the boy’s situation in a few plain clauses rather than pleading it – is the seed of a method Chekhov would spend the rest of his life refining.