To Yu. I. Lyadova, 21 September 1880. Moscow.

Chekhov was twenty, in his second year of medical school, when he wrote this to Yulia Ivanovna Lyadova, a friend of the family who had already received a letter from his sister Masha the previous November (see the letter of 18 November 1879). Here Anton writes the whole thing himself, snatching the paper away from “Marya” – his sister Maria Pavlovna – to get a word in before she can finish her own letter to the same correspondent. The household joke names are already in full swing: Mikhail Dyukovsky, the medical student who boarded with the Chekhovs, is toasted for having received the Order of St. Stanislaus, third class – the most junior and most routinely awarded imperial Russian decoration, so the household’s leaping-to-the-skies enthusiasm is itself part of the joke, a mock-triumph over a distinction that signified almost nothing.

The letter’s comic engine is the family’s private shorthand: an unnamed “Ivan Ivanovich,” expected to arrive paired with Yulia Ivanovna and instead showing up alone, is enough to provoke theatrical indignation; a drawn-out, mock-aristocratic “coun-t-t-t-tess” teases Lyadova with a title she does not hold. Chekhov signs with an invented mock-office, “Master of Sick Affairs” – medical school supplying the joke this time, as his future profession would supply a hundred more like it – and closes with a knowing jab at Marya for passing along gossip about Dyukovsky. It is a small piece, but characteristic of the twenty-year-old Chekhov: already reflexively turning his own household and its minor honors into material.