To N. A. Leikin, 5 September 1883. Moscow.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters"), was Chekhov’s principal editor through the early 1880s and the recipient of a long, businesslike, and often very funny correspondence about fees, deadlines, and the mechanics of getting comic copy into print. This short note from September 1883, written when Chekhov was twenty-three and still a medical student supporting his family on piecework journalism, is a small bundle of exactly such business: the torchon paper and fee from an earlier letter have arrived, a verdict on his brother’s drawing and on the poet Liodor Palmin’s verses gets a characteristically level second opinion, and a bookkeeping discrepancy of seventy-two kopecks is walked through with the deadpan precision of a man who has to account for every kopeck that comes into the house.

The letter’s real business, though, is the drawings by Chekhov’s brother Nikolai (referred to here simply as "my brother" and later as "Nikolai"), the talented, undisciplined illustrator whose contributions to Oskolki Chekhov is continually managing, excusing, and quietly underwriting – asking Leikin to accept work on Chekhov’s own invented themes, to waive the subscription count for a small sketch, and to feel free simply not to print anything that misses the mark. The offhand boast that "my foreign novels have passed muster" refers to the parodic "foreign novel" serials and burlesques Chekhov was turning out for the popular press at the time. The address that follows – Golovin Lane, off Sretenka, a large unplastered house with a bad-tempered dog – is the Chekhov family’s actual Moscow flat in these lean years, given here for Leikin’s promised visit in mid-September. The letter closes, as many of this period do, still signed with the pen name "A. Chekhonte" rather than the author’s own.