To P. G. Rozanov, 3 November 1884. Moscow.
П. Г. Розанову, 3 ноября 1884 г. Москва.
Headnote
A short, comic note to Pavel Grigoryevich Rozanov, apparently a doctor colleague living out in Zvenigorod district, congratulating him on some new appointment and commiserating – with mock gravity – over the mishap of a cast-iron shingle or sign Chekhov had shipped him, which arrived broken. The whole letter turns on Chekhov’s deadpan insistence that the packing (his own doing) is to blame, spun into a small comic set piece about the softness of certain books kept for a "certain necessity."
Written the year Chekhov graduated from medical school and began practicing, the letter also carries the ordinary texture of his professional circle: a greeting to a mutual acquaintance, Sergei Pavlovich, an inquiry about some competition to be raised with the publisher Leikin, and a wry aside on how patronage rather than merit governs advancement in Russia. Slight in substance, it shows the same quick, joking hand of the early Chekhonte period at work in private correspondence.