To N. A. Leikin, 6 August 1883. Moscow.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin was the editor of "Oskolki" ("Splinters" or "Fragments"), the St. Petersburg humor weekly that was, by 1883, the young Chekhov’s main outlet and his main source of income. Chekhov – twenty-three, still writing chiefly as "Antosha Chekhonte" and still supporting a large family on space-rates for jokes, sketches, and short comic fiction – wrote to Leikin constantly through these years: submitting work, apologizing for its faults, and angling, gently and persistently, for a fuller place in the journal’s pages. This letter finds Leikin away in Helsingfors (Helsinki), which does not stop the submissions from arriving.

The letter is a working writer’s business note dressed, as Chekhov’s business notes so often are, in charm. He sends stories and sketches, flags one – "The Daughter of Albion," a story that would become one of his better-known early comic pieces – as too long to trim further, and pays Leikin the kind of compliment a contributor pays an editor he depends on, praising the journal’s drawings and captions while needling its skirmishes with the censor and its occasional recycled material. Then, in a gesture typical of Chekhov’s generosity to other writers even at this early, precarious stage of his own career, he turns talent-scout: he recommends two minor contributors by name, sketching each with the same attentive, unsentimental eye he turns on his fictional characters – one an unpolished but promising young poet, the other a garrulous, put-upon staff-captain with a grievance about unpaid fees. The self-deprecating aside about his own blots and slovenliness is characteristic of the persona Chekhov adopts for editors throughout these years: brisk, useful, and careful never to overstate his own claims.

"Budilnik" ("The Alarm Clock") and "Strekoza" ("The Dragonfly") were rival Moscow humor journals in the same crowded market as "Oskolki," and the casual traffic of writers, jokes, and even stolen illustrations between them gives a glimpse of the small, competitive world Chekhov was working in before the stories outgrew it.