To N. A. Leikin, 6–8 October 1885. Moscow.

Written from Moscow in early October 1885, this brief business letter goes once again to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor-publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters"), for whom Chekhov supplied a regular "Fragments of Moscow Life" column. Chekhov opens with a change-of-address notice – he is about to move to a new apartment on Yakimanka Street – then works through a run of magazine business: puzzling over why his latest column didn’t appear (he decides the fault was his own for forgetting that the printing house closes for the Feast of the Intercession), offering a postal receipt as proof he mailed it on time, and asking Leikin to slip in one more item if there’s still room.

The letter also carries a stretch of Moscow gossip and literary byplay typical of Chekhov’s correspondence with Leikin: a censored story that found a home elsewhere under a new title, a droll account of visiting the poet Liodor Palmin in his remote lodgings, a mild jab at a colleague’s overstuffed prose ("Aloe," i.e. Chekhov’s brother Alexander), and a closing round-up of the city’s mood – hard frost, the opening of new clubs, and talk of a sensational unsolved murder on Nikitskaya Street. It is a compact, characteristic specimen of Chekhov’s working correspondence with his first regular editor: brisk, funny, and entirely occupied with the mechanics of getting copy into print.