To Ye. I. Yunosheva, 1884. Moscow.
Е. И. Юношевой, Июнь, около 17, 1884 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written in Moscow around 17 June 1884, shortly after Chekhov completed his medical degree, this brief note to Ekaterina Ivanovna Yunosheva finds him playing the role of literary fixer for a young acquaintance in need of income. He has lined up small translation work for her through Alexander Kurepin, editor of the humor magazine The Alarm Clock (Budilnik), one of the journals Chekhov himself wrote for under various pen names in these years, and jokes that the pay beats what she would get from the publisher Pushkaryov. The letter is playful and gallant in tone – mock-ceremonial promises of bells and cannon-fire to greet her arrival in Voskresensk, where the Chekhov family was then spending the summer – and closes with a cryptic, joking postscript about a rope, evidently an allusion private to the two correspondents.