To M. M. Chekhov, 10 April 1877. Moscow.
M. M. Чехову, 10 апреля 1877 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow on 10 April 1877, this is among the earliest of Chekhov’s letters to survive – he was seventeen. His elder brother Mikhail ("Misha") had just spent time with him in Moscow and was returning to Taganrog, the family’s home in the south, where their mother Yevgenia Yakovlevna remained. The family’s finances had collapsed three years earlier when their father’s grocery business failed and Pavel Chekhov fled to Moscow to escape debtor’s prison; the household was scattered, and Anton – left behind in Taganrog to finish school while selling off the family’s furniture to pay debts – would not himself move to Moscow to rejoin them until the following year.
The letter’s occasion is small (a request that Mikhail pass on Anton’s letters to their mother privately, and go on giving her comfort), but its undertone carries the weight of those years: a mother "broken in body and in spirit," a family held together at long distance by correspondence across the twelve hundred versts between Taganrog and Moscow, and a teenager already assuming the role – caretaker of his mother’s morale, manager of the family’s discretion – that would define much of his adult life. The prose is unmistakably that of a very young writer: earnest, looping, fond of a parenthetical aside dropped mid-sentence and never quite finished, reaching for a grand phrase ("this most serpentine of world") the mature Chekhov would have cut. None of the famous economy is here yet. What is here is the same watchfulness over the people he loved, turned for once on himself rather than a character.
The letter closes with greetings to Liza and Grisha – most likely family friends or relations in Moscow – and is signed, with the slightly formal flourish typical of the family’s letters at this period, "Your Brother A. Chekhov."