To P. P. Filevsky, 27 October 1880. Moscow.

Written 27 October 1880 from Moscow, this is the only surviving letter from Chekhov to Pavel Petrovich Filevsky, a schoolfellow from the Taganrog gymnasium who would go on to become a historian and local chronicler of Taganrog. At the time of writing, Filevsky was a student at Kharkov University and, like Chekhov, held a stipend awarded by the Taganrog town council to promising graduates of the gymnasium studying elsewhere – one of the small threads of practical support that kept Chekhov afloat as a first-year medical student in Moscow while he supported his family by writing comic sketches on the side.

The letter is entirely practical: Chekhov’s own stipend payment has not arrived, and he asks Filevsky, bluntly and without ceremony, whether his has come through, and whether the delay is general or something peculiar to himself. He mentions having already petitioned the town council directly and having received no reply. Nothing in the letter gestures toward literature, family, or the wider anxieties of that first Moscow winter; it is a young man chasing down money he is owed, phrased with the old schoolboy courtesies – "most humble servant" – that still governed correspondence between former classmates.

The letter closes with greetings passed on from Zembulatov, another Taganrog stipend-holder studying in Moscow, and with regards to schoolfellows still at the gymnasium – a reminder of how tightly the Taganrog cohort tracked one another’s fortunes even after scattering to different universities. No reply from Filevsky survives.