To P. A. Arkhangelsky, 1886. (?) Moskva.

1 This is a brief, undated note to Pyotr Alexandrovich Arkhangelsky, tentatively placed by the editors of the Soviet Academy edition at "not later than 1886" and located in Moscow. By the mid-1880s Chekhov was supporting his family partly through private tutoring and odd arrangements of this kind alongside his medical studies and burgeoning literary career, and notes summoning someone "at once" for "a lesson" belong to that everyday scramble of Moscow years rather than to any literary occasion.

2 The letter is a single-sentence errand: an urgent summons to come immediately because a tutoring lesson ("урок") has come up, with a warning not to be late. It has none of the literary or personal texture of Chekhov’s longer correspondence – it is closer to a hastily scrawled message than to a letter proper – but it is preserved in the collected correspondence as part of the complete record.