To S. Kramayev, 8 May 1881. Moscow.
С. Крамаеву, 8 мая 1881 г. Москва.
Headnote
Chekhov was twenty-one, midway through his medical studies in Moscow, when he wrote this to Solomon Kramarov, a Taganrog schoolfellow who had gone on to Kharkov. The two addressed each other in the mock-elevated, joke-piling style Chekhov reserved for old friends from home: "Wisest, and consequently, most viperous Solomon" sets the register for everything that follows, a performance of biblical solemnity immediately undercut by the insult folded into it.
The letter is Chekhov near the height of the Antosha Chekhonte manner: fast, scattershot, built on a string of unrelated items rather than a single comic idea. He reports on mutual acquaintances, jokes about a landlady’s niece he has decided not to pursue, teases Kramarov over a shared, half-serious "theory" about the toll fantasy takes on a young man, and needles him about a rumored beard. Running under the banter is the real texture of a poor student’s Moscow – lessons hard to find, a room found cheap, exams to pass, a provincial’s outsized love for the capital he has adopted ("Come!!! Everything is cheap. You can buy trousers for a ten-kopek piece!").
The letter’s ugliest passage cannot be read past or softened: Chekhov’s "May you dream of the Kiev-Elisavetgrad massacre" invokes the anti-Jewish pogroms that swept the Russian Empire’s southern provinces in the spring of 1881, in the wake of Alexander II’s assassination – Kiev and Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi) among the worst-hit cities – and names Ippolit Lyutostansky, a defrocked priest and notorious antisemitic pamphleteer of the period, approvingly as an ally. Addressed to a Jewish friend the tone carries as "black humor" between intimates who have this exchange elsewhere in their correspondence, but the assumptions behind the joke are the plain antisemitism of the milieu Chekhov grew up in, not a stance the translation should launder or explain away. The mature Chekhov’s later friendships and public positions – his defense of Dreyfus, his falling-out with Suvorin over it – stand at a real distance from the twenty-one-year-old writing this; the letter is left exactly as blunt as it is.
The envelope address folded into the letter’s close – "To His Excellency Viktor Ivanovich Barshevsky... for delivery to Solomon Kramarov" – shows the letter traveling by way of a third party’s address in Kharkov, an ordinary provincial habit when a young correspondent’s own address was unsettled or unreliable.