To N. A. Leikin, 4 November 1884. Moscow.

Nikolai Leikin, editor of the Petersburg humor weekly Oskolki ("Splinters"), was both Chekhov’s main employer in these years and a chronic source of friction: Chekhov’s copy came in late, thin, or not at all, and Leikin complained. This letter, written in Moscow in November 1884 – the year Chekhov qualified as a physician – is one long, good-humored piece of damage control: he is behind on his feuilleton, sick with fever, short of comic material, and defending himself against Leikin’s charge (relayed through the poet Liodor Palmin) that he withholds stories and topics out of spite. The exchange about "topics" – Leikin apparently paid extra for usable subject ideas – gives a rare glimpse of the piecework economics behind the comic weeklies Chekhov wrote for.

Two real cases anchor the letter’s closing turn from self-defense to business proposal. The Rykov affair was the trial, opening that November, of the directors of the Skopin Mutual Credit Society, whose decades-long embezzlement and fraud scheme – involving forged accounts and ruined depositors across the province – became one of the great courtroom sensations of the decade; Chekhov, ever alert to marketable material, offers to cover it for the Peterburgskaya Gazeta at a rate of fifty rubles a feuilleton. The letter closes on a lighter note with a recommendation for a struggling poet named Medvedev and a nudge about advertising revenue, the mundane back-and-forth of two men who ran a magazine together at a distance.