To P. Ye. Chekhov, 14–15 October 1882. Moscow.

By October 1882 the Chekhov household had been in Moscow for several years, ever since Pavel Yegorovich’s bankruptcy forced the family out of Taganrog. Anton, twenty-two, was in his third year of medical studies at Moscow University and already the household’s de facto man of business: the one who filled out forms, drafted petitions, and told his father, plainly and without ceremony, how to handle official paper. This note is one of the smallest surviving specimens of that role – not a letter in any literary sense, but an errand conducted in writing because father and son were, for the moment, in different rooms or different parts of the city.

The "petition" (proshenie) it refers to is not further identified, but the note’s two practical instructions – affix a stamp before the clerks can pilfer it, and date the document at the bottom in the petitioner’s own hand – reflect the ordinary friction of Russian bureaucratic life, where an unstamped or undated petition could simply be set aside or its stamp appropriated by an underpaid clerk. That Anton signs the approval of the form itself ("Good. It’s written in proper form") before turning to the errand about paper suggests he had just finished checking or drafting the document in question.

Nothing here anticipates the writer Chekhov was becoming. But the note is of a piece with dozens of others from these Moscow years: terse, practical, faintly wry ("or the clerks will steal it"), the tone of a young man already carrying more of his family’s daily business than his years would suggest.