To Al. P. Chekhov, 1881. Moscow.
Ал. П. Чехову, Март, не ранее 6, 1881 г. Москва.
Headnote
Chekhov was twenty-one, a medical student in Moscow, when he wrote this short, furious mock-legal letter to his elder brother Alexander. The two were already living the pattern that would recur for years: Alexander older, gifted, chronically unstable, prone to drunken scenes and to turning family tenderness into leverage; Anton, younger but already the household’s de facto authority, refusing to be managed by either sentiment or threat.
The letter stages itself as a deposition – "I, Anton Chekhov, am writing this letter in a sober state, in full possession of my senses" – a parody of the legal-affidavit formula, aimed at forestalling whatever excuse Alexander might later offer. The occasion was evidently a drunken outburst ("today’s scandal") that had ended, or threatened to end, in a blow; Chekhov’s reference to "The Sleepwalker" – a piece Alexander had apparently written or claimed authorship of – turns the brother’s own professed sensitivity back on him as evidence of hypocrisy. The closing pun on "brother" (which Alexander had used as an appeal, a half-threat, at the end of their confrontation) shows the pattern that becomes constant in the family letters: Anton drawing a hard line under sentimentality that others try to use as a lever.
Nothing here is literary output in the ordinary sense, but it is an early, vivid instance of what the mature Chekhov the correspondent will do constantly and at far greater length in the family letters of the 1880s: adjudicate, with icy comic precision, between the people who depend on him and the people who try to manipulate that dependence.