To M. M. Dyukovsky, 24–25 August 1883. Moscow.

Written on 24 or 25 August 1883 in Moscow, this brief note goes to Mikhail Mikhailovich Dyukovsky, a friend from Chekhov’s Taganrog schooldays who shared his taste for jokes, theatricals, and – evidently – a pet terrarium. Chekhov was twenty-three, already publishing comic sketches and squibs under the pen name “A. Chekhonte,” and supporting the family household on Moscow’s outskirts near the Kaluga Gate, where his father had recently found a post as watchman at a tradesmen’s school.

The letter is a small piece of theater before it is a letter at all: Chekhov frames it as a text being read aloud by his younger brother Ivan on the way to post it, so the reader overhears the joke rather than simply receiving it. The request itself – for a bound set of Dyukovsky’s own comic “letters,” apparently a private literary game between the two – is buried under mock-solemn invocations (the terrarium, the girl in the blue portrait), theatrical exaggeration, and the deadpan wish that Dyukovsky’s own household be blessed with a screaming infant, just as Chekhov’s has been by the arrival of his older brother Alexander’s family. “Grandmother” (Chekhov’s family nickname for a household elder) sends her regards in the same breath as the demand for copy, a fair sample of how thoroughly comic performance and domestic bulletin run together in the young Chekhov’s correspondence.

The address on the reverse – written out in full, with Dyukovsky’s formal patronymic and honorific – is the ordinary furniture of the period’s postal etiquette, preserved here as Chekhov left it. Nothing in the letter aims at more than an in-joke between friends, but the timing and instinct are already the writer’s: compression, a scene sketched in a few concrete strokes, and a punchline that lands without any editorial comment from the author.