To M. M. Chekhov, 16 June 1885. Moscow.

This brief note, dated 16 June 1885 in Moscow, is addressed to Chekhov’s cousin Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov, the same Kaluga merchant’s-son cousin ("Misha") to whom the very earliest surviving letters in this collection were written a decade before. By 1885 Anton, twenty-five, was a practicing physician and an increasingly busy comic writer supporting the whole Chekhov household in Moscow, and this letter is a small, practical apology rather than a literary performance.

Chekhov declines an invitation to dinner at his cousin’s, citing three overlapping obligations in the space of an afternoon: an errand to Tverskaya Street to collect money owed to him "on commission," a suburban train he cannot afford to miss (the family kept a dacha outside Moscow that summer), and the need to keep watch over his elder brother Nikolai, whom he shadows "like a guard" to keep him from wandering off – a glancing, worried reference to Nikolai’s drinking, which was already a source of family anxiety and would contribute to his early death within a few years. The note is characteristic of Chekhov’s mid-1880s correspondence: terse, itemized, faintly self-deprecating about his own overcommitted schedule, and shot through with the domestic responsibility – breadwinner, doctor, and now also his brother’s keeper – that the comic "Antosha Chekhonte" persona of his published sketches rarely let show.