To A. S. Kiselev, 25 December 1886. Moscow.

1 Written on 25 December 1886 in Moscow, this is a brief holiday greeting to Alexey Sergeyevich Kiselyov, the owner of the Babkino estate near Voskresensk, where the Chekhov family had spent several summers as Kiselyov’s tenants and where Anton had formed a warm, joking friendship with the household. The addressees named alongside Alexey Sergeyevich are his wife, Maria Vladimirovna Kiselyova (herself a children’s writer and a regular correspondent of Chekhov’s), Vasilisa Panteleyevna (a member of the Babkino household), and Seryozha, the Kiselyovs’ young son.

2 The letter is a short, formal-affectionate New Year’s greeting rather than a substantive piece of correspondence: a single sentence of good wishes built around the wry aside that an old friend is “better than two new ones,” addressed collectively to the whole Babkino household. Its interest lies less in content than in what it documents – the ongoing warmth between Chekhov and the Kiselyov family after the Babkino summers.