To N. A. Leikin, 4 June 1883. Voskresensk.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin was the editor of "Oskolki" ("Splinters" or "Fragments"), the Petersburg humor weekly that had become, by the summer of 1883, the chief outlet for the twenty-three-year-old Chekhov’s comic sketches – and Leikin the closest thing he had to an editor-mentor in these early years, forever pressing him for more copy and grumbling when it was late or short. Chekhov writes from Voskresensk, a small town outside Moscow where his brother Ivan taught school and where Anton spent his summers decompressing from his medical studies and the grind of magazine work; the letter’s closing instructions – have "Oskolki" forwarded to "the teacher of the parish school" – register that provincial, borrowed address.

The letter is a snapshot of the traffic between two humor magazines that divided young Chekhov’s loyalties: "Strekoza" ("The Dragonfly"), where he had placed his first published pieces in 1880 and worked alongside Leikin himself and a colleague signing as "I. Grek," and "Oskolki," to which Leikin had since drawn him and to which he now owed the bulk of his output. Chekhov defends himself against a suspicion that someone else’s work under his old pseudonym "Krapiva" ("Nettle") has been running in "Strekoza" without his hand in it – an early instance of the pseudonym confusion that dogs the attribution of Chekhov’s uncollected juvenilia to this day, since he wrote under more than a dozen names in these years and other hands sometimes wrote under the same ones.

Underneath the business is the familiar complaint of the jobbing humorist: too much material for one outlet, too little time, and a geography of editorial loyalties – Moscow renounced, Petersburg narrowed to two journals – that leaves him, as he puts it, "worse off than a governor." The two hunting stories he promises, "Before the 29th of June" and "The 29th of June," belong to the annual cycle of Petrovka-season sketches Chekhov produced for the sporting calendar of the humor press; the letter’s mix of self-deprecating comedy about his own indolence and brisk professional housekeeping is characteristic of his correspondence with Leikin throughout these apprentice years.