To N. A. Leikin, 1883. Moscow.

Written in Moscow in March 1883, this letter belongs to Chekhov’s long and businesslike correspondence with Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, the editor of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Fragments") and, at this point in Chekhov’s career, his chief employer. Chekhov was twenty-three, supporting his family largely on the fees Leikin paid for the short comic sketches he was turning out at a startling rate, and the letter is written in the register of that working relationship: prompt thanks for a payment received, a forecast of his own output for the coming season, and a small favor passed along for a fellow contributor.

The letter’s real interest is the middle section, where the correspondence briefly turns personal. Chekhov asks Leikin – himself a published writer of provincial and merchant-life sketches well before he became an editor – for a copy of one of his own books, and reconstructs from provincial memory a single story that had stuck with him: merchants returning from the Easter matins, a late boy with the kulich, a phrase overheard from a photograph-seller. It is a small, telling instance of Chekhov’s own instinct for the concrete detail that outlasts the plot around it, turned here toward someone else’s writing rather than his own.

The postscript, about postage stamps now wrapped in paper before being sealed into the envelope, is the kind of purely practical aside that runs through the working correspondence with Leikin – proof that even the business end of Chekhov’s letters carries his eye for the small material fact.