To N. P. and I. P. Chekhov, 28 April 1880. Moscow.
H. П. и И. П. Чеховым, 28 апреля 1880 г. Москва,
Headnote
This is not one letter but a bundle of them, copied into the collected correspondence under a single date and a single sheet: Chekhov was twenty and in his second year at Moscow University, sharing cramped rooms with his elder brother Alexander and writing home, in the same sitting, to two different kinsmen – their godfather Nikolai Petrovich (an editor’s business proposal relayed on his behalf), and their younger brother Ivan, still at school. Alexander’s hand opens the letter; Anton’s closes it, and the two voices trade off through nonsense signatures ("Alex. Chandler," a joke on the family name) and a private refrain – the word "squint-eyed" (kosoi), inserted six times for no reason the text explains, evidently a running joke between the brothers that needed no gloss for its intended reader.
The business underneath the noise is real: Kicheev, editor of the satirical weekly The Alarm Clock, wants Alexander – who had begun placing comic drawings and sketches in the Moscow humor press – to come work for him, having noticed his contributions to a rival paper, The Demon. Around this sits a thicket of student self-mockery: an anatomy exam scraped through with a 3, a German mark salvaged only by an examiner nicknamed "Julius Caesar," a demand for power of attorney to collect money from an art dealer for their mother. The Ivan Pavlovich section is pure holiday burlesque – a New Year’s greeting built entirely from invented, grammatically correct but semantically empty Russian ("driving a lamp into the chastity of cream of tartar with a hammer"), the kind of deadpan glossolalia the brothers performed for each other’s amusement and that the professional Antosha Chekhonte would soon learn to sell.
Nothing here anticipates the mature Chekhov; that is exactly its use. It is a document of a large, teasing, in-joke-saturated family finding its comic timing on each other before any of it went into print, and of Anton already serving, at twenty, as the practical middleman – passing on an editor’s offer, chasing down money for his mother – underneath all the noise.