To N. A. Leikin, 12–13 October 1885. Moscow.

Written from Moscow in mid-October 1885, this letter continues Chekhov’s regular correspondence with Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor-publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters") and, at this point, Chekhov’s principal editor. He writes from a new apartment across the Moscow River and opens on a note of professional anxiety, reacting to a crackdown on the journal ("the rout at Oskolki") with unusual gravity for a writer whose letters to Leikin are typically breezy: he broods on tightening censorship, the precariousness of a literary income, and his envy of an earlier generation of writers who worked under looser constraints. He then turns to practical magazine business – explaining a lull in submissions, promising a new story about actors timed to the theater season, and weighing whether he can afford the trip to Petersburg that Leikin has been urging on him, laid out here in frank detail about his family’s finances and his fear of debt.

The letter closes in a lighter, more familiar register: a note on his fixed income from medical practice limiting how much he can write, holiday well-wishes on Leikin’s purchase of a country estate, a line about the weather, and an account of Tuesday evenings at his apartment with music, young company, and the poet Liodor Palmin, whom Chekhov is trying to coax back into society. It is a letter that moves, in characteristic Chekhov fashion, from real worry about money and censorship to wry social comedy within the space of a page.