To N. A. Leikin, December 1885. Moscow.

Written from Moscow in the first days of December 1885, this short note goes to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor-publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters") and Chekhov’s principal editor at the time. Its business is purely practical: Chekhov has moved to a new apartment – the Klimenkov house on Yakimanka Street – and writes chiefly to pass along the address ahead of Leikin’s expected visit to Moscow, so his editor won’t have to search the street for him. He notes that magazine correspondence can keep going to the old address, since the postal carriers already know where he lives, and encloses a note on behalf of an importunate acquaintance named Mendelevich, whom he dismisses with a flash of comic exasperation.

Brief as it is, the letter carries two small, characteristic touches: a folk simile ("worse than bitter radish") and a closing postscript, added after the signature, in which Chekhov says he expects Leikin at his door daily and reports that the poet Liodor Palmin is currently out of humor with him – a running thread in his correspondence with Leikin from this period. It is a minor but genuine specimen of Chekhov’s daily housekeeping correspondence, useful chiefly for dating his move to Yakimanka Street and for its glimpse of his social circle in the winter of 1885.