To Al. P. Chekhov, 9 March 1876. Taganrog.

Chekhov was sixteen and still at the Taganrog gymnasium when he wrote this to his elder brother Alexander, who had already left for Moscow. It is the second surviving letter in the correspondence, and its game is entirely linguistic: rather than write in Russian, the schoolboy Chekhov composes most of it in a deliberately mangled German, larded with Russian words dropped in wherever the vocabulary or the joke demanded it (открытие, ревнует, наоборот), and closes with a stretch of Russian transliterated letter-by-letter into the Latin alphabet, as though the whole performance needed one more layer of disguise. The published edition carries a Russian gloss of the German passages in brackets, marked "(нем.)" for nemetskii, German; this translation keeps that same architecture, rendering the glosses into English while leaving Chekhov’s German exactly as he wrote it, warts and all.

The content is teenage gossip dressed up as intrigue: a concert at the Alferaki house in Taganrog, two sisters – Marie and Luise Feist – each said to be jealous of the other’s claim on Alexander, and a mock-scolding address to him as "Herr Masepa," a joking allusion to the legendary Cossack-and-lover figure of Mazepa, crowned with the promise of a parcel: a copy of The Stammerer (Заика), sent for his brother to "read and marvel" at. The signature itself performs the joke one last time, first Cyrillic ("А. Чехов"), then Germanized ("A. Tschechof").

None of this is major Chekhov – it predates the writer by a decade – but it is useful precisely because it is minor: a document of a large, crowded, multilingual provincial family (the Chekhovs’ father had drilled some German and church Slavonic into his sons) turning language itself into a private joke between brothers. The macaronic German-Russian voice, the invented nicknames, the theatrical exclamations ("A was ist das?") are the same comic instincts – excess, mimicry, the deadpan escalation of a bit – that the nineteen-year-old Antosha Chekhonte would soon turn into a professional trade in the Moscow humor weeklies.