To G. P. Kravtsov, 29 January 1883. Moscow.

Written in Moscow on 29 January 1883 to Gavriil Pavlovich Kravtsov, an acquaintance from outside the immediate family circle whose household – Alyosha, Sasha, Zoya, Nina, and a Natalya Parfentyevna singled out for a particularly warm bow – Chekhov clearly knew well and had stayed with as a guest. Anton Pavlovich was twenty-two, in his third year of medical studies at Moscow University, and already the household’s principal earner, turning out comic sketches and captions on commission for six or seven of the Moscow humor weeklies at once. The letter answers one from Kravtsov that has not survived, but its content is legible from Chekhov’s reply: thanks for a stay in Kravtsov’s house, an offer of magazines in return, and an irritated retort to some remark of Kravtsov’s about a change in their relative "suit" – the card-game metaphor (mast’, suit as in a deck of cards) standing in for social rank or standing, which Chekhov rejects with the flat claim that he has not yet "spoiled" and does not intend to start sorting people by rank.

The letter is a compact self-portrait of Chekhov at this exact moment: the punishing freelance schedule (to bed at four, writing "to order," at eight kopecks a line), the money that comes in but is eaten by cab fares, the health already beginning to fail, and the practised comic self-signature – "the Man Without a Spleen" – under which he was by now publishing regularly in "Oskolki" and elsewhere. The variant signatures he lists (A. Chekhonte, M. Kovrov, the Man Without a Spleen) were all pseudonyms he was actively cycling through in the humor press of these years, a necessity for a writer placing work in several competing magazines at once. The closing address – Sretenka, Golovin Lane, the house of Yeletsky – is the Chekhov family’s Moscow flat in this period, noted here, as often, because a correspondent might otherwise try an editorial office and miss him.