To M. M. Chekhov, 1 January 1877. Taganrog.
M. M. Чехову, 1 января 1877 г. Таганрог.
Headnote
Chekhov was sixteen, still three years from Moscow and the household of pseudonyms he would soon write under. The family had already broken up: his father’s shop in Taganrog had failed the year before, and in 1876 his parents and younger siblings fled north to Moscow ahead of their creditors, leaving Anton behind, alone, to finish school and sell off what remained of the household. He supported himself through tutoring – the "pupil" who fires off rockets and worse in this letter is one such pupil, boarded with him for a fee. Mikhail ("Misha"), the addressee, was the younger brother to whom Chekhov would go on writing for the rest of his life; "Sasha" is their eldest brother Alexander, already in Moscow with the rest of the family.
The letter is a fireworks display in more than the literal sense: a gunshot into the fence, a "shot" fired at Sasha by pen, rockets set off in a rented room, and a joke sending "natural, Cossack" gunpowder from an altogether less official piece of artillery – the ordinary crudeness of a bored teenage household. It is worth reading as an overture: the compressed wit, the deadpan escalation of a pun until it collapses ("the gun didn’t burst, but the pen very nearly broke"), the theatrical self-mockery about his own "foolish letter," and the sudden capacity to turn a joke serious without warning – Easter in Moscow, is that a mistake too? – are all recognizably the instincts of the mature writer, seventeen years early. The mock-clerical turns of phrase ("seeing as I am meek of spirit") parody the pieties of his devout mother and the Church Slavonic he had drilled at school; the closing "in a Lomonosovian style" – a jab at his own grandiloquence, named for the eighteenth-century poet and grammarian Mikhail Lomonosov – is the same joke turned on himself.
This is among the earliest of Chekhov’s letters to survive, predating by several years the first stories signed "Antosha Chekhonte." Nothing here was written for publication; it is a bored, freezing, homesick boy keeping himself company at midnight on New Year’s, and it is very funny.