To N. A. Leikin, 19 September 1883. Moscow.

Chekhov writes to Nikolai Leikin, editor of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters"), from Moscow in the autumn of 1883. He is twenty-three, still signing himself with the byline "Antosha Chekhonte," and still supporting his family chiefly on the fees these short comic pieces earn him. The letter is a working writer’s report to his editor: what has been sent, what is still in the trunk, what the competing Petersburg paper’s correspondent is up to.

Two of the pieces mentioned here are landmarks. "In Moscow, on Trubnaya Square" belongs to the loose, observational sketches of city life that Chekhov was turning out at speed for the Moscow humor press. "The Swedish Match," written for Nikolai Khudekov’s Dragonfly Almanac and described here as "a parody of the crime story," is the piece now read as Chekhov’s first sustained exercise in detective fiction — a genre send-up that also shows him working, for the first time, at story length rather than in the column-inch sketches Oskolki demanded.

The letter’s texture is exactly the freelance grind: anxious jokes about not jinxing a good run of work, calculations of what will sell (the "School of Painting" piece, he reasons, will be bought by every student enrolled there), and gossip about a rival Petersburg columnist writing under the pseudonym "Rover." The exchange about Leikin’s own "Petersburg notes" — praised for wit but faulted, gently, for generality over particulars — is Chekhov’s own aesthetic already declaring itself: the demand for the concrete fact over the general observation that will define his mature prose.