To M. M. Dyukovsky, February 1886. Moscow.

1 This brief note, written to Chekhov’s childhood friend Mikhail Mikhailovich Dyukovsky sometime between mid-January and February 1886, is a comic mock-invoice rather than an ordinary letter. Chekhov drafts it in the form of a formal itemized business account from a fictitious firm, "A. P. Chekhov & Co.," tallying 27 roubles supposedly owed by Dyukovsky: 25 roubles taken on credit, 1 rouble for binding some books, and 1 rouble for cab fare to a Mr. Azanchevsky, signed off by Chekhov in the invented role of "Responsible Bookkeeper."

2 The source preserves the piece’s original tabular layout – a header row (roubles/kopecks) followed by line items each split across several short cells – which this edition renders as a sequence of very short sections mirroring the original table structure rather than merging them into prose. The joke depends on Chekhov’s love of bureaucratic and commercial parody, a recurring vein in his 1880s comic writing and correspondence with close friends.