To Al. P. Chekhov, 12 November 1882. Moscow.
Ал. П. Чехову, 12 ноября 1882 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow on 12 November 1882 to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander Pavlovich, then living apart from the family and already established as the addressee of the mock-abusive, joke-stacked style Anton reserved for him alone. Anton was twenty-two, in his third year of medical school and already the household’s chief earner, doling out scolding and money in the same breath – exactly the two currencies this letter trades in.
The letter is business dressed as insult. Alexander was translating for the Petersburg weeklies under the same rough arrangement Anton worked, and the numbered points that structure the middle of the letter – send the rest of the novel, stop wasting time on translation when you could write your own material, and here is an accounting (short-changed, by Anton’s own cheerful admission) of what you’re actually owed – are the real content, wrapped in the fraternal mockery ("frivolous and laughable brother") that is the letter’s real register. "Bzy," to whom Alexander owes both a manuscript and, evidently, money, and "Gavrilka," briefly and elaborately absolved of blame in the middle of the letter’s most tangled joke, are figures from the same Petersburg humor-magazine world the brothers both wrote for; the letter assumes a shared cast Anton does not pause to introduce, in keeping with his rule here that no explanation interrupts the comic momentum.
The nonsense honorific "Aikanovo-Khodakovsky" plays on the name of Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski, a Polish-Russian folklorist and antiquarian of the previous generation, grafted onto an invented place-name – the kind of mock-elevated title Chekhov liked to bestow on a brother playing at grandeur he had not earned. The single French aside – Mari d’elle, glossed in the source itself as "her husband" – drops into the middle of a joke about a liar’s exaggerations and is Chekhov’s own interlinear gloss, not an editorial addition.
The letter closes on the ordinary texture of a large, scattered family’s correspondence: a debt settled with someone named Khvedya, regards passed to a cousin’s household, a note that a family friend is to be married, and Chekhov’s own plan for the evening – the opera Faust, with Marya – tossed off as an afterthought, the whole letter’s business concluded in a few dozen lines between one obligation and the next.