To M. M. Chekhov, 7 December 1876. Taganrog.
M. M. Чехову, 7 декабря 1876 г. Таганрог.
Headnote
This is the earliest letter of Chekhov’s that survives – written on 7 December 1876, in Taganrog, when Anton Pavlovich was sixteen years old. The addressee, Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov, was a first cousin some fifteen years his senior: the son of Anton’s uncle Mitrofan Yegorovich Chekhov, mentioned warmly in the letter itself. By 1876 the family in Taganrog was in crisis – Anton’s father, Pavel Yegorovich, had gone bankrupt the year before and fled his creditors to Moscow, taking most of the household with him, and Anton had been left behind alone in Taganrog to finish school and, for a time, to fend for himself. A letter from an older, more established cousin, extending the hand of family friendship, mattered to a boy in that position more than its brief and formal contents might suggest.
The letter’s elaborate courtesy – "I had the honor and the pleasure,I have the honor to be, your respectful younger brother and obedient servant" – is the schoolboy Anton reaching for the register he takes to be proper between men who barely know each other, and the strain of that reaching is itself part of the document: the same letter that speaks so formally of honor and duty closes with proverbs, teasing asides about his brothers Sasha and Kolya, and a joke about Kolya’s paintings stranded at a Moscow railway station. Even here, at sixteen, the pivot from ceremony to plain talk and back again is recognizably the hand that would later build entire stories on exactly that kind of tonal seam.
The book Sasha had urged on him, referred to only as "Cosmos," has not been identified with certainty; the "war" that has snarled the rail traffic through Kursk Station is the Serbo-Turkish conflict of 1876, which had disrupted transport across the empire that autumn. Nothing else of substance passes in the letter – greetings, a request to be written to, a promise to write back – but as the first surviving trace of a correspondence that would eventually run to several thousand letters, its smallness is exactly the point.