To Al. P. Chekhov, 25 December 1882. Moscow.
Ал. П. Чехову, 25 декабря 1882 г. и 1 или 2 января 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
By the turn of 1882 into 1883, Anton Chekhov – twenty-two, a fourth-year medical student at Moscow University – was already the household’s chief earner, writing comic sketches and captions for the humor weeklies to keep the family solvent. His elder brother Alexander, meanwhile, was off in Taganrog, drifting between journalism and a customs post, and the two brothers’ letters from this period are a running double act: Anton needling, advising, and mock-scolding, Alexander supplying the gossip and the excuses. This letter, begun on Christmas Day and finished a week later over the New Year, catches Anton in full comic flight even as the family’s money troubles sit just under the surface.
The opening salutation – "Catcher of contrabandist-men-universes, customs brother of mine, reddest of men" – is typical of the brothers’ private idiom: a mock-Biblical, mock-official flourish built on Alexander’s actual job chasing smugglers at the customs house, inflated to absurdity for the joke’s own sake. The numbered items that follow are Chekhov’s own invention, a private newsletter format he used often with Alexander: weather, family news, a candid professional critique of Alexander’s translation work (with real advice underneath the joshing – write less, or write better, and stop translating "rubbish"), a warning about a new government decree affecting those in state service, and closing items on money, which the family, as so often in these years, did not have.
Two family nicknames recur without gloss in the Russian and are carried straight through in translation: "Nikolka" is the brothers’ next-eldest sibling, Nikolai, the painter, teased here for never answering his correspondence; "squint-eyes" (kosye) was the household’s private name for family members with a slight cast in the eye, used here with the same affectionate mockery Chekhov turns on everyone in the letter, himself included. The editors, publishers, and colleagues named in passing – Putyata, Pastukhov, Kurepin, Pushkaryov – belong to the small, competitive world of Moscow’s comic press that Chekhov was, at this point, still learning to work to his advantage.