To Yu. I. Lyadova, 18 November 1879. Moscow.

This letter, dated 18 November 1879 from Moscow, is unusual among Chekhov’s surviving correspondence in that he barely wrote it. The body is in the hand of his younger sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhova (“Masha”), then nineteen, writing to her friend Yulia Ivanovna Lyadova with the ordinary business of a young woman’s letter: an apology for a slow reply, an evening spent telling fortunes with cards, a trip to the Bolshoi to see Glinka’s "A Life for the Tsar," and greetings passed along a whole circle of family and friends. The household described is the Chekhovs’ first Moscow apartment, crowded with medical students who boarded and studied alongside the family – among them Mikhail Dyukovsky, Dmitry Savelyev, and Vasily Zembulatov, all mentioned here as they would be mentioned in a dozen other family letters of these years.

What makes the letter worth keeping is its shape: after Masha signs off, two of those student-boarders add their own lines in their own hands, each identifying himself half-seriously by his future profession (Savelyev as a doctor bound for Shuya, Zembulatov as a future zemstvo physician in the Don Cossack lands), a young men’s household joke about announcing themselves as personages before they have qualified as anything. Then, at the very bottom, Anton – twenty years old, already the family’s comic correspondent even in a letter he did not write – appends a single mock-formal line ("I have the honor to assure you of my deepest respect") signed with the invented title "Taganrog tradesman," followed by a throwaway exclamation about rushing off to Zhitomir. It is less a letter from Chekhov than a letter he crashes: the household’s collective voice, with his own dropped in at the end like a punchline, already showing the instinct for undercutting solemnity that would define the mature stories.