To M. P. Chekhova, 6 May 1886. Petersburg.

1 A very short, jokey note from Chekhov, written in Petersburg on 6 May 1886, to his younger sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhova ("Masha"). He announces his arrival home by mail train on the 8th, mentions that his brother Mikhail will meet him, and hopes that their acquaintance "Kokosha" has gone off to the Kiselyov family’s estate at Babkino, where the Chekhovs often summered. A mock-formal signature ("Editor: A. Chekhov") gives way to a run of teasing fragments involving one "Efros" – evidently a family joke or nickname – including an announcement, undercut by an editorial note that words were later cut from the surviving autograph, that Chekhov has "married."

2 The letter is a miniature of Chekhov’s private household voice at twenty-six: clipped, punning, and full of in-jokes now largely opaque to outside readers (Efros’s "long nose," the swine/sow wordplay, the chocolate). Its interest lies less in content than in tone – the same comic, self-parodying register he used across his early family correspondence, here compressed into a handful of lines. The cut passage after "I have married" is a reminder that some of the Chekhov family’s letters survive only in edited or damaged form.