To P. G. Rozanov, 18 February 1885. Moscow.
П. Г. Розанову, 18 февраля 1885 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written on 18 February 1885 from Moscow, this letter is addressed to Pavel Grigoryevich Rozanov, a physician and fellow doctor at Chikino (near Voskresensk, outside Moscow) whom Chekhov had come to know through his own medical work in the area and treated as a warmly teasing friend and colleague – the mock-Latin salutation "Collega major et amicissime" ("senior and most friendly colleague") sets the tone at once.
The letter is really an elaborate comic errand: Chekhov wants Rozanov to approach a local shopkeeper, Starichenko, about renting his dacha near Zvenigorod for the summer, and rather than simply asking, he scripts out the whole negotiation as a miniature dialogue, complete with a fainting merchant overwhelmed at the thought of housing "the well-known Moscow doctor and no less well-known man of letters." Practical detail – leaking ceilings, whole windows, a cellar, the family’s dacha fatigue with Voskresensk – is folded into the joke rather than separated from it.
The letter closes with a scatter of the small, half-connected items typical of Chekhov’s informal correspondence: a prescription noticed at a patient’s house, a mention of a friend (Korobov) down with typhus, an IOU for ninety kopecks, regards to a mutual acquaintance, and an instruction to keep the dacha plan quiet. It offers a glimpse of the twenty-five-year-old Chekhov juggling his medical practice, his family’s summer arrangements, and his instinct – even in a note about real estate – to turn ordinary business into a small scene.