To N. A. Leikin, 21–24 August 1883. Moscow.
Н. А. Лейкину, Между 21 и 24 августа 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin was the editor of Oskolki ("Splinters"), the St. Petersburg humor weekly that ran Chekhov’s rapid-fire comic sketches and squibs under the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte. Leikin, nearly twenty years Chekhov’s senior and already an established comic writer himself, paid by the line, held his contributors to strict length limits, and pressed them for punctual, regular copy – by the summer of 1883 Chekhov, twenty-three and supporting a large household on hack journalism while finishing his medical degree, was one of his most reliable suppliers.
This letter is an apology, and a comic one, for a bad week’s work. Chekhov is writing from the family’s cramped Moscow flat, and the joke is structural: each interruption he catalogues – the screaming child of a visiting relation, the father reading aloud in the next room, a music box playing "Helen the Beautiful," a bedridden guest who will not stop talking medicine – is offered as an excuse for pieces he already knows are thin, and the excuse becomes the better piece. The mock oath never to have children, and the swerve into an imagined French caricature for Oskolki itself, show the sketch-writer’s habit of turning any material, including his own excuses, directly into copy.
The letter also catches Chekhov in the two lives he was working simultaneously that year: "my non-literary work" is his medical practice, already treated here with the same rueful distance he gives everything else, and the household’s demand that the family doctor discuss diagnoses at all hours is folded into the same comedy as the noise and the crowding. Voskresensk, where he hopes to escape in September, was the small town outside Moscow where he served as a locum physician and later set several stories. The closing formalities – "with respect I have the honor to be" – are the period’s business correspondence convention, kept even between a demanding editor and a writer who elsewhere in the same letter is telling jokes at his own expense.