To Al. P. Chekhov, 25 January 1883. Moscow.
Ал. П. Чехову, 25 января 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written on 25 January 1883 from Moscow to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander (“Al. P.”), then living in Taganrog with the extended family circle Anton still calls, in mock-official style, “chief clerk.” Anton was twenty-two, in his third year of medical school, and already supporting the household by piecework journalism – the letter is a compressed bulletin of both lives at once, tossed off between patients and deadlines.
The domestic business is dense and practical: reassurance that the family in Moscow is well, a complaint about Alexander’s silence, and a string of errands and messages relayed to their uncle, Mitrofan Yegorovich, who remained in Taganrog – missing magazine issues to be re-sent, a debt of gratitude for letters not yet properly answered, an apology (only half-serious) for the “twitchings” that keep Anton from his commissioned work. A dictionary is promised to keep the uncle occupied in the meantime. Even at this rate of pay – eight kopecks a line, which Chekhov states without complaint or pride, simply as a fact of the ledger – he is already the one managing money, favors, and correspondence for people older than himself.
The middle of the letter turns to his sister Maria (“Marya Pavlovna,” the future Masha of the mature letters and plays), reported here in the third person with the same deadpan irony he turns on everyone: a newspaper account of a Moscow ball has thinly veiled her under initials, and Chekhov catalogues, with a straight face, the literary men of the day – Palmin, Kruglov, the Nemirovich-Danchenko circle – paying her the kind of attention Taganrog reserves for its icons. It is an early instance of the register that will define the mature stories: report the flattering fact exactly, and let the comedy sit in the reporting rather than in any comment on it.
The letter closes on the same brisk, itemized note it opened with – regards to Alexander’s wife and to his young son Shurka (sent off, not quite affectionately, to catch goldfinches), a crack about the magazine Zritel (“The Spectator”) being profitable but dull without its absent secretary, a promised summer surprise for Anna Ivanovna, and a practical note about when the newspaper subscription resumes. Nothing in it aims at literature; it is family bookkeeping conducted at high speed, in a voice already unmistakably Chekhov’s.