To M. M. and Ye. M. Chekhov, 6 May 1877. Taganrog.

Written from Taganrog on 6 May 1877, less than a month after the letter to Mikhail translated above (10 April, from Moscow). Anton, seventeen, had returned south to finish school while the rest of the family remained scattered around Moscow; Mikhail had evidently stayed behind there. The letter is really two short notes stitched into one: a hurried line to Mikhail excusing his silence and begging him to write, and a separate, more ceremonious note appended for "Sister" Elizaveta Mikhailovna – a name that recurs in the family’s correspondence from this period as someone newly and warmly folded into the household’s circle, though the letters do not spell out exactly how.

The tone is characteristically double. To Mikhail, Anton is brisk and self-deprecating, blaming the business of "May and June" (in contrast to Mikhail’s Lenten fast) for his failure to write, and deflecting the question of a summer visit with a joke – "the Minister of Finance will explain the reason to you" – that says everything about the family’s straitened circumstances without naming them. The note to Elizaveta Mikhailovna shifts register entirely: a mock-formal "humblest bow" and "bitterest reproach" for having left Taganrog without seeing her, resolved by a small, oddly tender joke about perfume of hers he apparently took away by accident. Already visible here, at seventeen, is the instinct that would define the mature letters: intimacy carried through a joke rather than a declaration, and real feeling for people kept just barely under the surface of comic form.

The dateline is doubled in the source ("6 May" at the head, then "18 6/V 77" – Julian and Gregorian reckoning together – lower down), a habit of the family’s correspondence at this period. The letter closes with "Amen," a small piece of the household’s private idiom rather than anything devotional.