To M. M. Chekhov, 30 September 1882. Moscow.
M. M. Чехову, 30 сентября 1882 г. Москва.
Headnote
A note of a few lines, dated Moscow, 30 September 1882, addressed to a namesake relative, M. M. Chekhov, on the occasion of his name day. Anton Pavlovich was twenty-two, in his second year of medical school at Moscow University and already writing constantly for the humor weeklies under his early pseudonyms to help support the family; a card like this one was a small, unremarkable courtesy tucked between deadlines.
The form is the formulaic one of nineteenth-century Russian name-day greetings – the fixed phrases of "honor and pleasure," the extension of regards to the addressee’s household, the apology for sending words instead of appearing in person – and Chekhov reproduces it faithfully, without embellishment. Its interest is not literary but documentary: it is a fragment of the enormous, unglamorous correspondence – notes to cousins, uncles, and family friends – that surrounded the young Chekhov’s more consequential writing, and that the complete edition of his letters preserves alongside it.
The second line’s laconic dateline, "2, 30/IX," in the source, is a piece of the same shorthand Chekhov used across his early letters home: a private notation of place or sequence whose exact reference is not recovered from the letter itself.