To Al. P. Chekhov, 8 November 1882. Moscow.

Written in Moscow on 8 November 1882 to his elder brother Alexander ("Al."), then serving as a customs official in Taganrog – hence the mock heading "Customs" with which the letter opens. Anton Pavlovich was twenty-two, in his third year of medical studies at Moscow University, already writing constantly for the humor weeklies to help support the family, and clearly enjoying a rare evening of unbuttoned correspondence with the one sibling who could be trusted to answer in the same key. Alexander was the family’s other literary talent and its most disreputable member – clever, dissolute, perpetually late with money and sober conduct alike – and Anton’s letters to him run a register no other correspondent got: crude, funny, fast, and full of private shorthand.

The letter’s most quoted line parodies Matthew 7:1 ("Judge not, that ye be not judged") by substituting a verb for "fornicate" – delivered deadpan, in Church Slavonic cadence, as a rebuke for the "obscene epistles" Alexander had apparently been sending home. It sits beside a joke that only makes sense from a third-year medical student: that massage is licit where intercourse is forbidden. The Latin diagnosis "cancer prostatae" is Chekhov’s own clinical idiom breaking into a family letter, glossed by the nineteenth-century edition (as elsewhere in the correspondence) for the Russian reader; the same is true of "eandem," a lawyer’s or clerk’s Latin dropped in mid-sentence as a private joke about formality.

The household inventory in the fourth section – father asleep, mother praying, an aunt occupied with pickling roots, the servant Anna about to bring in the chamber pot – is Chekhov’s reportorial eye at work even in a private letter: the same unadorned, itemized noticing that would become his signature method in the mature fiction, here turned on his own crowded apartment. The numbered requests that follow (the smuggler, the seance, the childhood verses about the boy who "became a general," the group photograph from the Strakhov studio) show him already the family’s organizer and archivist, chasing down memorabilia and gossip with the same brisk itemization he brings to the household scene.

The letter closes in a spray of private references and pure nonsense: "Rp." and "DS." are pharmacist’s shorthand (Latin recipe abbreviations for "take" and "let it be labeled") turned into a mock prescription label; the peasant-voiced fragment "what’s to come of this here?" – rendered in the source’s own deliberately mangled spelling – has no discoverable referent and reads as a private catchphrase or a scrap overheard and enjoyed for its own sake. None of it is meant to survive scrutiny; it is the sound of two brothers keeping each other entertained across three hundred miles.