To M. E. Chekhov, June 1886. Babkino.
M. E. Чехову, 20-е числа июня 1886 г. Бабкино.
Headnote
Written in late June 1886 from Babkino, the Kiselyov family’s estate outside Moscow where the Chekhovs summered, this short letter goes to Mitrofan Yegorovich Chekhov, Anton’s uncle in Taganrog – a devout, plain-living merchant’s clerk whom Anton addressed with real affection and treated, half-teasingly, as a model of provincial virtue. Its occasion is practical: Mitrofan Yegorovich evidently belonged to some charitable or religious brotherhood obliged to publish an annual report of its activities, and Anton, drawing on his contacts as a working Moscow journalist, supplies him with a list of newspapers in Odessa, Kharkov, Moscow, and Petersburg willing to print such notices, along with brisk instructions on how to submit one.
Slight as the occasion is, the letter is a small window onto Chekhov’s double life in 1886 – physician and rising writer, on one hand, hurriedly helping an uncle place a notice in the provincial and metropolitan press; ailing and overworked on the other, complaining in the same breath of toothache and hemorrhoids. The closing lines turn to family news (a cousin Georgy’s new post, a debt of gratitude to a doctor named Yeremeyev) and to a topical question about a rumored administrative reassignment of Chekhov’s native Taganrog – small details that anchor the letter firmly in place and moment even as its practical purpose remains modest.