To Ye. I. Yunosheva, 2 November 1883. Moscow.

Written in Moscow on 2 November 1883, this is one of the shortest items in the surviving correspondence – four sentences built around a single joke – and it is signed not with Chekhov’s name but with “Neizvestny,” “Unknown.” The addressee, E. I. Yunosheva, appears to have kept some kind of personal collection, evidently including insect specimens gathered by her circle of acquaintances; the note reads as a playful gift accompanying an actual dead beetle.

The joke is pure Antosha Chekhonte, the persona under which the young Chekhov was publishing his comic squibs in the Moscow humor magazines during these same months: a mock death notice for the beetle, cause of death given as hopeless love for a female student, complete with the solemn vocabulary of Orthodox commemoration – "panikhida," the memorial service, held "daily" – deployed over an insect. The closing aside, that the beetle’s fate should instruct certain artists who likewise cannot support a family, glances at the real financial pressure under which Chekhov himself was already writing to support his parents and siblings, turned here into a throwaway one-liner rather than a complaint.

Nothing beyond the note itself identifies Yunosheva further, and the anonymous signature is itself part of the game: a small, private piece of comic correspondence, not meant to carry any weight beyond the moment it was written.