To N. A. Leikin, 26 May 1883. Voskresensk.

Written on 26 May 1883 from Voskresensk, a small town in Moscow province near the New Jerusalem Monastery where the Chekhov family was spending the summer, this note goes to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, the editor and publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki (“Splinters,” here left in its Russian form by the letter’s own habit of naming it plainly). Leikin was, at this point, Chekhov’s principal editor and paymaster: the twenty-three-year-old medical student was supporting his family largely on fees for the comic sketches, captions, and short pieces he was turning out at high speed for Oskolki and the other humor papers under the pen name Antosha Chekhonte.

The letter’s ostensible business is a change of mailing address for a fee payment, and Chekhov turns even that into a small comic set piece – worrying, at length and with mock gravity, that copyists and postal clerks will mangle “Voskresensk” into “Voznesensk,” or drop the town designator and strand his money in the wrong Voskresenskoye altogether (he notes, with the era’s taste for onomastic humor, that the name is as common in Russia as Ivan is among given names or Benevolensky among priests). The rest is a brisk survey of his summer idleness: he hasn’t seen the last few issues of the paper, doesn’t know how much unpublished work of his is still on hand, and is coasting rather than producing – though he promises, in the same breath, to sit down that evening and write something.

The letter is also a small window onto the working rhythm of these years: a young writer keeping track of his backlog with his editor, negotiating payment logistics from a rented dacha, and describing his surroundings (the monks of New Jerusalem, the pull of the open country) with the same economical, unsentimental eye that would later organize his mature prose. The closing complaint about the “bosom of nature” being ruinous to discipline is characteristic: even relaxation gets diagnosed, briskly and without self-pity, as a kind of professional hazard.