To L. A. Kamburova, 17 September 1880. Moscow.

Chekhov wrote this note on 17 September 1880, in Moscow, to Lyubov Alexandrovna Kamburova, a family friend from Taganrog, on the occasion of her name-day. He was twenty, a first-year medical student supporting his family by writing comic sketches for the Moscow humor magazines under a string of pseudonyms; "the Skeptic" was one of the noms de plume he used in this period, and he signs off in it here as a private joke rather than his own name.

The note is a miniature of the household’s comic register: the mock-formal congratulation, the pie "stuffed with every possible good wish," the joke about his "thin brother" (Nikolai, the painter, who adds his own signature below Anton’s). The address to "Nikolai and Ioann Dobchebobchinsky" fuses the names of Gogol’s inseparable town gossips Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky from The Government Inspector into one absurd compound surname, aimed at two real Taganrog acquaintances the Chekhov circle evidently found comic in tandem. Nothing here is meant to be taken straight; the joke is the whole content.

Letters this slight survive in the record because the Chekhov family kept everything, and because even the throwaway notes of the twenty-year-old show the instincts that would define the mature writer: the economy, the straight face, the refusal to explain the joke.