To I. I. Babakin, 1883. Voskresensk.

This is one of the briefest notes to survive from Chekhov’s early Moscow years, written from Voskresensk, the small town outside Moscow where the Chekhov family spent its summers and where Anton Pavlovich’s father had found work as a warehouse clerk. Chekhov himself, twenty-three and already supporting the household on a medical student’s stipend and the fees from his comic sketches, used these summer weeks to write, to see patients at the local hospital, and to keep up a stream of teasing correspondence with friends and acquaintances drawn into the family’s orbit there.

The addressee, I. I. Babakin, is one of the minor figures who pass briefly through Chekhov’s letters of this period without leaving much further trace – the kind of correspondent whose name survives only because Chekhov wrote to him. The note itself is pure banter: an approving "well done," a mock-formal thanks, and the promise of a place in Moscow because he will be "more needed there." The joke depends on withholding exactly what Babakin has done to earn the praise – a private allusion the two men shared and that the letter does not trouble to explain.

Chekhov signs as "A. Chekhonte," the pen name under which nearly all of his comic journalism of these years appeared, and which still governs his voice even in a two-line private note: brisk, arch, and gone before it has properly arrived.