To M. M. Chekhov, 8 February 1877. Taganrog.

This is the earliest of Chekhov’s letters to survive, written on 8 February 1877 from Taganrog, where the seventeen-year-old Anton had been left behind to finish school after the rest of the family fled to Moscow ahead of his father’s creditors. The addressee is his cousin Mikhail Mikhailovich Chekhov, a merchant’s son in Kaluga, roughly Anton’s own age, to whose household Anton’s older brother Alexander (“Sasha”) had gone to stay – and, evidently, to be spoiled with food and drink to the point of writing an incoherent, misspelled letter demanding that Anton drop everything and visit.

The whole piece is a comic performance built entirely out of that one small domestic joke – a fattened, half-deranged cousin firing off an overexcited invitation – spun out through mock alarm, absurd images (a letter-writer transforming into a well-fed turkey, a hypothetical dance with a scandalized brother Nikolai), and a parody of formal epistolary address. It already shows the instincts of the future “Antosha Chekhonte”: the deadpan escalation, the specific concrete detail deployed for comic rather than sentimental effect, the willingness to interrupt himself and change subject without transition. The German words dropped into the sign-off – Bruder, Schwester, eine, each glossed by Chekhov himself in the Russian, a nod to the sentimental German novels he mentions reading a paragraph earlier – are a schoolboy’s private joke, mocking a genre he already found ripe for parody.

Practically, the letter also carries the ordinary furniture of provincial correspondence in the 1870s: a request for photographs, Lenten scruples about slipping something forbidden into a fasting-season letter, an apology for cheap paper and envelope, and the full formal address written out on the reverse as etiquette required, followed by its own small joke undercutting the “very urgent” on the front. Nothing here anticipates the mature Chekhov of the later stories, but the comic engine – restraint broken only by a single, escalating absurd image – is already running.