To N. A. and L. S. Zakoryukiny and I. I. and Yu. I. Lyadov, 25 December 1880. Moscow.

This is not really a letter at all but a printed New Year’s greeting card, dashed off in the formula of the season and addressed jointly to two married couples – the Zakoryukins and the Lyadovs – whom the Chekhov household counted among its circle of relations and family friends. Chekhov was twenty, newly arrived in Moscow to study medicine, and already the household’s semi-official wit; the family had a running joke of numbering its sons, and here he signs himself "Chekhov No. 3" rather than by name, treating even a formal courtesy as an occasion for a small private joke legible only to its recipients.

The text is pure convention – the stock phrasing of a holiday card, right down to the flourish of declaring the good wishes valid retroactively for New Year’s Day as well as Christmas, as if extending a receipt. There is no news, no confidence, nothing of substance; its interest is entirely documentary; it survives as one of the very earliest scraps in his correspondence, from a period when nearly everything he wrote outside his student notebooks and his first comic pieces has been lost. The terse date line that closes it, "’80 25/XII year," in place of a proper signature-and-place formula, is of a piece with the card’s function: it is bookkeeping, not prose, and it is worth reading only for what it tells us about how early, and how habitually, this correspondent turned even a form to be filled in into a small performance of himself.