To N. A. Leikin, 6 April 1886. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 6 April 1886 to the publisher Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor of the magazine Oskolki (“Fragments”), this letter is chiefly business: Chekhov is assembling a collection of his stories and sends Leikin the marked-up originals, tells him which pieces to include or cut, and debates a decorative vignette for the cover, proposing a compromise print run split between copies with and without it. Woven through the practical talk are family and social notes – an excerpt forwarded to his brother Nikolai, thanks for a photograph, a jab at their mutual friend Bilibin’s squeamishness, and a report that he is about to go treat the injured journalist “Gilyai” (Vladimir Gilyarovsky), hurt in a fire.

2 The letter is notable for its frank, unemotional report of Chekhov’s own health: he describes coughing blood and weakness, and speculates – as a trained physician diagnosing himself – that the trouble may lie in his throat rather than his lungs. Written more than eight years before his tuberculosis was formally acknowledged, this is one of the early written traces of the condition that would eventually kill him, delivered with the same brisk, undramatic tone he uses for cover-vignette logistics a paragraph earlier.