To M. M. Chekhov, 4 November 1877. Taganrog.
M. M. Чехову, 4 ноября 1877 г. Таганрог.
Headnote
This is the earliest of Chekhov’s letters to survive, written when he was seventeen and still at the gymnasium in Taganrog, the provincial port town on the Sea of Azov where the family had lived since before his birth. By late 1877 the rest of the household – his parents and most of his siblings, including Mikhail, the addressee here – had already left for Moscow, driven out by his father Pavel Yegorovich’s bankruptcy the previous year. Anton stayed behind alone to finish his schooling, supporting himself on tutoring fees and sending money to Moscow rather than the other way around, an arrangement that would mark his sense of family duty for the rest of his life.
The occasion is Mikhail’s name day (Archangel Michael’s feast, 8 November by the old calendar, though Chekhov writes a few days early), and the letter has the stiff, formulaic warmth of a schoolboy dutifully performing an epistolary genre he has not yet made his own – the tricolon of health, money, and family happiness, borrowed wholesale from greeting-card convention. But the real content is underneath the form: an apology for long silence, a joke about his "secret illness" being simply having no money, and the flat, repeated word скука – boredom, deadly boredom – that will recur throughout his life’s correspondence and eventually give a title to one of his best-known stories. Taganrog, provincial and theatre-poor by comparison with the Moscow he has evidently only visited, already reads to him as a place to escape.
The letter closes with the addressee block reproduced as Chekhov wrote it on the envelope: not a modern postal address but the older Russian convention of naming the recipient and the promise of personal delivery – "into his own hands" – the kind of note attached to a letter carried by an acquaintance rather than trusted to the post alone.