To N. A. Leikin, 10 December 1883. Moscow.

Chekhov was twenty-three, still five years from a medical degree, and already supporting a household of parents and siblings on comic journalism. Nikolai Leikin edited Oskolki ("Splinters"), the St. Petersburg humor weekly that was Chekhov’s steadiest outlet in these years, and this letter is a progress report to an editor from a contributor who is, by his own account, running on empty.

The letter catalogues the pressures of the double life: medical study by day, the "daily bread" of feuilletons and squibs by night, a body giving out under both. Chekhov mentions a bout of fever he feared was typhus, contracted from patients – a reminder that he was already treating the sick even as a student – and the return of his brother Nikolai (the painter, not to be confused with the addressee Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin), which he hopes will lighten the load at home. "Ruver" was one of Chekhov’s own recurring pseudonymous personae for a Moscow-gossip column he ran for Leikin; he is asking, in effect, to be relieved of a beat that has stopped paying its way in either money or material.

The letter also shows the machinery of 1880s periodical writing up close: rival papers scoured for anything usable, a story ("Trouble Upon Trouble") placed elsewhere and its draft already given away, a proposal to crowdsource a column from readers’ "couplets," a complaint about a cut reference to one Zheltov, a minor Moscow figure worth mocking only because he was locally famous enough to be recognized. None of it is complaint for its own sake – the tone stays wry and self-deprecating even at its most exhausted, the closing formula ("your obedient servant") entirely conventional against the letter’s real content: a young writer, overworked and unwell, already outgrowing the trade that was paying his bills.