To P. Ye. and Ye. Ya. Chekhov, 20 June 1878. Taganrog.

Chekhov was eighteen, still finishing the gymnasium in Taganrog while the rest of the family scraped by in Moscow after his father’s bankruptcy, when he sent his parents this note – if "letter" is even the word for it. There is no salutation, no news, no request for money; instead the eighteen-year-old stages a piece of found bureaucratic comedy, a mock censor’s imprint of the kind stamped on the flyleaf of a permitted publication, followed by an absurd roster of "censors" who supposedly passed it for print.

The joke works by escalating incongruity. Pope Leo XIII, Bismarck, and the Ottoman general Osman Pasha – fixtures of the foreign-news columns during the Russo-Turkish War then underway – sit on the same committee as a fictional archimandrite, Chekhov’s own brother Ivan, and a cast of invented grotesques: a Greek merchant given the mock-obsequious title "My Wicked Wilfulness, Sir," a baron whose entire name is a slapstick command ("Lay Down His Head"), a Shah, and finally the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II paired, for no reason but sound and nonsense, with "Nautilus." It is the gymnasium wit of a boy who has spent the year reading newspapers for the war news and made a private game of the grandiloquent names in them – recognizably the same instinct for parody and invented officialese that would soon fill the comic weeklies over the signature "Antosha Chekhonte."

Sent to both parents rather than to a brother, the piece has none of the guilty, dutiful tone of Chekhov’s letters to Mikhail from the same years; it reads instead like a performance for an audience already used to his jokes, proof that the future writer’s ear for bureaucratic absurdity and invented names was in place years before it found a paying outlet.