To M. I. Morozova, 27 August 1883. Moscow.

Written on 27 August 1883 in Moscow, this is not really one letter but three, folded into a single sheet and addressed to Marfa Ivanovna Morozova – “Marfachka,” an older relative or family friend at Taganrog, Chekhov’s native town in the south. Three hands take their turn: first Chekhov’s mother, Evgenia Yakovlevna, reporting on her journey home from a stay with the Morozov household and a stop at Voronezh to venerate the relics of St. Mitrofan; then Chekhov’s younger brother Nikolai, passing along a query about school fees for a relative’s son; then Anton himself, twenty-three and already the family’s most reliable correspondent, closing out the sheet with news, jokes, and instructions for a sick child’s salt baths.

The comedy here is domestic and layered. Nikolai’s contribution ends with a jab at Anton – “getting married, making quite a catch!” – followed by a word crossed out in the original, evidently by Chekhov’s own hand, suppressing whatever insult his brother had aimed at him. Anton’s own section returns the favor, needling Nikolai in turn over a supposed engagement to a wealthy bride. Their mother has the last word: both sons are lying, nobody is getting married, and she sends photographs to prove that at least the family’s faces, if not their marital prospects, are honestly reported. It is a small, characteristic scene of Chekhov family correspondence – errands, small debts of hospitality, and teasing conducted in public, on a shared page, where each writer can read what the others have said and answer it in the same breath.

Nothing here aims beyond the household: a mother’s thanks for hospitality, a brother’s request for information, a young writer’s affectionate joking with women he had known since boyhood in Taganrog. But the instinct for the telling detail is already at work even in this minor exchange – the spoonful of salt to two buckets of water, the crossed-out word standing in plain sight of what it hides, the mother who signs off by calling herself, in her son’s voice, the family’s “little liar.”