To P. G. Rozanov, May 1885. Babkino.
П. Г. Розанову, Май 1885 г. Бабкино.
Headnote
Written in May 1885 at Babkino, the Chekhov family’s rented summer estate outside Voskresensk, this short note is a piece of pure comic mischief rather than a real petition. Chekhov addresses it, in mock official language, to the district doctor of nearby Zvenigorod – almost certainly a colleague or acquaintance from his own medical circle, since Chekhov had briefly served as a substitute doctor at the Zvenigorod district hospital that spring. Adopting the stiff phrasing of a formal petition to "Your High Nobility," he asks the doctor to retrieve a red shirt he had left behind with a Dr. Uspensky in Zvenigorod and forward it to Babkino as "material evidence" of his stay there.
The letter’s real joke is its second half: Chekhov "sends along" a certain Madame Markova for a medical examination of her heart, in which, she has apparently confided, the doctor’s image has become "imprinted" – and asks that this image be bottled in spirits and mailed back to him. He signs off with the invented title "Surgeon of Pathology." The note is characteristic of the playful, punning byplay Chekhov kept up with friends from his student and early medical years, folding his professional vocabulary into an absurd flirtation conducted by proxy.