To V. V. Bilibin, 11 March 1886. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 11 March 1886 to Viktor Viktorovich Bilibin, a fellow contributor to and, from 1886, secretary of the humor magazine Fragments (Oskolki), edited by Nikolai Leikin. Chekhov and Bilibin were close correspondents in these years, trading literary gossip, jokes, and shop talk about the comic press. The letter touches on a play Chekhov has just submitted to the dramatic censor, his refusal of a pay raise at Fragments out of concern for Leikin’s budget, the breaking off of an engagement, a critical but affectionate assessment of Bilibin’s writing style, his recent story "The Witch" (published in New Times), an enthusiasm for reading Darwin, a typhus outbreak in Moscow, and a boyhood anecdote involving a steward named Bilibin on Count Platov’s estate in the Don region.

2 The letter is a good example of Chekhov’s private epistolary voice in his mid-twenties: quick shifts of subject, self-deprecating humor, professional calculation about rates and word counts, and a mix of genuine anxiety (the typhus epidemic, money) with playful banter. The remark about "The Witch" and about his own tendency to write things the "devil" pushes him toward gives a glimpse of his ambivalence about the more serious fiction he was beginning to produce alongside his comic journalism.