To R. R. Golike, 1886. Petersburg.

1 A brief, playful note from Chekhov to Roman Romanovich Golike, a St. Petersburg publisher and printer with whom Chekhov had personal and professional ties, written in early December 1886. Chekhov passes along greetings from his sister Maria to Golike’s wife, Gulda Martynovna, and sends his own regards to Anna Arkadyevna, apparently a mutual acquaintance. He closes with a teasing postscript recalling an incident involving a lady whose fur coat disappeared at the Hermitage.

2 Though slight, the letter is characteristic of Chekhov’s private correspondence: warm, joking, and full of in-group references whose full context is now lost to us (the “eight-story” thank-you likely plays on an earlier joke about a “six-story” bow between the two correspondents). Such notes illustrate the easy, half-teasing intimacy Chekhov maintained with friends in the Petersburg publishing world even amid his growing literary career.