To Al. P. Chekhov, 5 January 1883. Moscow.

Written within days of the long New Year’s letter that precedes it in the correspondence, this note to Alexander is its opposite in scale: a handful of quick lines, dashed off with a covering letter to Nikolai Leikin, the editor of "Oskolki" ("Fragments"), enclosed in the same post. Chekhov was twenty-two and had just begun placing work regularly with Leikin’s Petersburg weekly, the magazine that would carry the bulk of his early comic writing and, within the year, put him on a fixed page rate. The letter’s businesslike compression – itemized notices rather than developed jokes – reflects a household running two threads of correspondence at once: family news to Alexander, professional courtship to an editor, sent in the same envelope to save the postage and the trouble.

Chekhov signs off the gift of "Oskolki" with two of his own pseudonyms of the period, "Man Without a Spleen" ("Человек без селезенки") and "Nettle" ("Крапива") – among the dozen or so noms de plume he cycled through before settling on "Antosha Chekhonte," used to spread his by-line across several magazines at once without an editor noticing how much of the issue one young writer was filling. The banned "Kuryer" and its state-approved replacement "Russkiye Vedomosti" register a small collision with the press censorship of Alexander III’s early reign, which shut down or suspended a number of liberal papers in the early 1880s; Chekhov reports the substitution as routine domestic news, the way another correspondent might report a change of grocer.

The letter closes with two glancing, private references that need no more than a nod here: the unnamed "A. I." at "Zritel" ("The Spectator," another of the comic weeklies Chekhov wrote for that winter) and Marya, evidently a household servant or acquaintance entrusted with a heavily sealed letter – "five seals" being the sender’s joke at his own postal anxiety rather than anything of substance inside. Small and unresolved as it is, the letter is a snapshot of exactly what Chekhov’s life looked like at this moment: several magazines, several names, and a great deal of unglamorous logistics, all managed in the same rapid, wry hand.