To N. A. Leikin, 30 September 1886. Moscow.

1 Written in Moscow on 30 September 1886 to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor of the humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters") and Chekhov’s chief editor-patron of the early 1880s. Chekhov reports on money troubles – an unpaid fee from the "Gazette" (the newspaper Peterburgskaia gazeta, edited by Sergei Khudekov) and a petition he has sent Khudekov for a raise from the meager per-line rate – and asks Leikin to intercede. He then moves through a run of personal and literary business typical of his letters to Leikin: his brother Nikolai’s frightening bout of illness (bloody vomiting), his own health and vices (smoking, drinking, and not knowing foreign languages), a visit from the poet Liodor Palmin, a visit from the journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky ("Gilyai"), a query about the silence of fellow writer Viktor Bilibin, arrangements for placing advertisements in various provincial papers, and an exhortation to Leikin to try writing for the stage. It closes with a stray remark on whooping cough and the plain signature "Yours, A. Chekhov."

2 The letter is a good specimen of Chekhov’s working correspondence with Leikin in this period: terse, itemized, moving briskly between practical business (fees, advertisements, contributors’ health) and sharp, affectionate character sketches – Palmin’s dishevelment and "empyrean" unworldliness, Gilyarovsky’s comic aside about "humankind’s confinement" – that show the same eye for telling detail Chekhov was bringing to his published sketches at the time.