To M. M. Chekhov, 16 April 1878. Taganrog.

Written on 16 April 1878 from Taganrog, this brief Easter greeting is one of the eighteen-year-old Anton’s letters to his cousin Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov, a merchant’s son of about his own age living in Moscow. By 1878 the rest of the family had already relocated to Moscow ahead of his father’s creditors, and Anton – still finishing school in Taganrog – was keeping up the family’s scattered correspondence largely alone. Misha’s household, which included his sister Elizaveta Mikhailovna ("Lizchen") and their relative Grisha, recurs across several of these early letters as a fixed point of family news and small favors.

The occasion is Orthodox Easter, and the letter is built entirely out of its formulas: the paschal greeting and response (“Christ is risen, and risen indeed!”), the customary exchange of an Easter kiss extended in absentia to relatives Anton cannot embrace in person, and the traditional wish of “many years” in place of an ordinary goodbye. There is none of the comic excess of the near-contemporary letters to the same cousin – no fattened correspondents turning into turkeys, no mock-formal parody – only the plain, dutiful observance of the calendar’s chief feast, extended to a household Anton clearly held in real affection.

What survives beyond the greeting itself is the letter’s own physical apparatus: a fragmentary date-stamp, the closing signature, and the full postal address written out on the reverse as etiquette required – Zamoskvorechye, the merchant quarter across the Moscow River, and the house of one Ivan Yegorovich Gavrilov, presumably Misha’s landlord or employer at the time. Slight and formulaic as it is, the letter is a small data point in the family’s geography during the Taganrog years: proof of an address kept, a bow duly sent, a boy still minding the family’s manners from three hundred miles away.