To I. P. Chekhov, October 1883. Moscow.
И. П. Чехову, Вторая половина октября 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written in the second half of October 1883 in Moscow, this letter goes to Chekhov’s younger brother Ivan Pavlovich – the steadiest of the Chekhov children, already working as a schoolteacher and soon to hold a post in Moscow itself. The opening is missing from the surviving text, so the letter begins mid-thought, already deep in the family’s perennial subject: money, lodging, and how to get Ivan settled somewhere close enough that the two brothers, and by extension the household Chekhov was supporting almost single-handedly, might pool their resources.
Chekhov was twenty-three, the acknowledged breadwinner of a family his father’s failed grocery business had left in Taganrog-bred precarity, and the letter’s ledger of grievances is characteristic: he earns more than army lieutenants and still can’t scrape together rent, food, or a room to work in, while his older brother Nikolai drifts from one comfortable billet to the next with no intention of settling down before old age. The biblical phrase he reaches for – setting up house “in the image and likeness of God” – lands with its ordinary weight rather than irony: domestic order, not luxury, is what he wants. Alongside the money talk sits the young comic writer’s other life: his contributor’s copy of the sporting journal Nature and Hunting, read for its fishing notes and its essays in the manner of the naturalist Sergei Aksakov, and the “bad vaudeville” he is cooking up on the side while attending medical lectures.
The letter closes with the loose ends of provincial business – Pushkaryov’s candle venture and a possible opening it might create for Ivan, a contact named Yakovlev not yet run down – handled in the clipped, itemized way Chekhov reports practical matters to family: no ceremony, no explanation beyond what the recipient already knows, and a promise, kept many times over in this correspondence, to write again soon.