To M. M. Dyukovsky, 5 February 1883. Moscow.

Chekhov was twenty-two in February 1883, still a medical student, and already the family’s chief earner through a torrent of comic sketches, captions, and stories placed in the humor weeklies under pseudonyms like Antosha Chekhonte. That standing – unpublished by literary fame, but plainly connected and productive – is what put an unsolicited manuscript from a stranger, M. M. Dyukovsky, in his hands to judge.

The letter is a rejection, but a working editor’s rejection rather than a young writer’s: brisk, practical, and careful not to wound. Chekhov reports that he shopped the piece to two editorial offices himself, gives the technical reasons it was declined – wrong length for the daily and weekly press, wrong tone (something in verse, evidently, attempting a serious subject in a form editors would not take seriously) – and then, rather than leaving it there, proposes a real alternative: self-publication through the book trade on Nikolskaya Street, the district of cheap presses and booksellers in central Moscow that supplied the mass market outside the literary journals. He offers to make an introduction through friends "who specialize in that line," while being honest that he cannot promise when.

The courtesy of the address – "Dear Sir," the full name and patronymic, the closing "Yours respectfully" – belongs to a stranger’s correspondence, the formal register Chekhov would drop within a line or two once he knew someone. Nothing else is known to distinguish Dyukovsky from the many aspiring writers who found their way to Chekhov’s desk in these years; the letter survives as one instance of a service he performed constantly and without much notice – reading, judging honestly, and where he could, still finding a door left open.