To N. A. Leikin, 31 December 1883. Moscow.
Н. А. Лейкину, 31 декабря 1883 г. Москва.
Headnote
Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin was, at this point, the man Chekhov answered to. Leikin edited Oskolki ("Splinters" or "Fragments"), the Petersburg comic weekly that had become the chief outlet for Chekhov’s early journalism, and their correspondence in these years runs to the business of a jobbing contributor reporting to his editor: shipments of copy, word counts, deadlines, money. Chekhov was twenty-three, still signing much of his work "Antosha Chekhonte," and still supporting a large household on piecework rates.
This letter closes out 1883 in exactly that register. The New Year’s number needs trimming and Chekhov, characteristically, asks Leikin to do the cutting himself rather than do it to his own copy – a small, practical humility that recurs throughout the Leikin correspondence. Money is short enough that a trip to Petersburg for the holidays is out of the question. And the letter’s back half is pure miscellany: Liodor Palmin, a minor poet and fellow Oskolki contributor known for writing even his personal letters in verse, has sent one such letter and also apparently pestered Leikin on a family errand involving flannel cloth for Chekhov’s brother, which Chekhov moves to redirect through the magazine’s own address rather than his. Mikhail Evstigneev, an illustrator and comic writer of the older generation, is a running joke Chekhov keeps returning to: he wants Evstigneev’s life story and has been angling for it for a year.
Two things are worth watching for. One is the tone: warm, brisk, deferential without being obsequious, closing on an antique formula ("your humble servant") that Chekhov uses half in earnest, half as a period joke – the letter’s very last line, "Frost. A blizzard," is the kind of bare weather-notation that will later become one of his signatures on the page, doing here in miniature what it will do at much higher stakes in the mature fiction. The other is the sheer density of small names and small favors: Leikin, Palmin, Evstigneev, "Budilnik" (a rival comic weekly Chekhov also wrote for) – a working writer’s ordinary traffic, the raw material out of which the larger literary life would be built.