To Al. P. Chekhov and A. I. Khrushcheva-Sokolnikova, 3–6 February 1883. Moscow.

Written from Moscow in early February 1883, this letter is really two letters in one envelope: the first eight sections to Chekhov’s brother Alexander, the remainder to Anna Ivanovna Khrushchova-Sokolnikova, a family friend living with her household somewhere warmer than Moscow – the closing half-joking reference to "spring there already" places her south, likely in the Crimea or the Caucasus, where Alexander himself was then working. Anton was twenty-two, midway through medical school, and already the family’s most reliable earner from journalism – both halves of the letter are, in their different registers, business dressed as banter.

To Alexander the news is professional: the humor weekly Oskolki ("Fragments"), edited by Nikolai Leikin, and Zritel ("The Spectator") are the two outlets paying Chekhov by the line, and he reports his rates, his output, and his standing with an unmistakable pride under the comic throat-clearing ("Sergei Petrovich shed a tear"). The aside about medical exams and the mock-Italian flourish finita la comedia – glossed in the source itself, "the comedy is over" – catches the double life of the period: a fifth-year student supporting the household by writing jokes between anatomy exams, already unsure which vocation is the real one.

The second half, to Khrushchova-Sokolnikova, is lighter and more affectionate in its scolding – teasing her for not writing, invoking a local wit ("Struzhkin") for a pun on kopek and line, and closing with the family’s running jokes about her son Shurka and a tavern-keeper named Boriskin. The manuscript breaks off mid-sentence; the closing line, addressed to "whoever needs it," trails into a note from the nineteenth-century editors that the rest has not survived – an ordinary casualty of letters kept, half kept, and lost across a large, scattered family’s correspondence.