To G. P. Kravtsov, December 1879. Moscow.

Written at the very end of 1879, Chekhov’s first year in Moscow as a medical student at the university, this is a New Year’s greeting to Gavriil Pavlovich Kravtsov, a landowner whose farmstead at Ragozina Balka, in the steppe near Taganrog, the Chekhov family had known from their southern years. The Kravtsovs recur throughout Chekhov’s correspondence of the following decade – he would stay with them repeatedly on his trips south in the 1880s, and later letters describe the household in detail: old Kravtsov himself, his wife, and a red-cheeked Cossack officer son, Pyotr (“Petya”), all living in a small thatched-roof house set among forest and open steppe that Chekhov found more agreeable than anything Taganrog itself offered.

Nothing here yet has that later texture – it is a first, dutiful greeting from a nineteen-year-old newly arrived in the capital, and it runs on the stock machinery of provincial epistolary etiquette: the elaborate address (“Deeply respected” / “Gavriil Pavlovich!”), the formulaic wish for the New Year, the roll call of regards to named family members, and the equally formulaic sign-off, “I have the honor to be your most humble servant.” The one line that breaks the formula and shows the hand that will write the mature comedies is the throwaway “and to the forest” tacked onto the list of people to be greeted – the steppe landscape itself folded into the round of regards, as though it were one more member of the household.

The postscript turns brisk and practical: a standing arrangement to trade flower seeds with the neighboring Tsvetkov family (whose very name means “of the flowers”), and a note that he has heard from another correspondent, Pavel, over the autumn. The letter is otherwise unremarkable as writing, but useful as a marker: it shows the eighteen-year-old medical student still tending, however briefly, the network of southern acquaintance he would keep returning to on his trips home throughout the 1880s.