To Al. P. Chekhov, 26 January 1887. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 26 January 1887 to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander, then in Petersburg, this is another of the brisk business letters Anton sent him that winter. Money is tight; he instructs Alexander to collect a fee owed by the "Peterburgskaya Gazeta," to pursue payment for the story "Enemies" from "Novoye Vremya" if needed, and to handle a magazine subscription and a small errand for their uncle’s servant Ivan, all funded out of Anton’s own earnings.

2 The letter mixes urgent financial instructions with Chekhov’s characteristic fraternal teasing – mock-formal warnings about Alexander’s "swindling nature," a crude parting gesture assigned to him at the "Solntse" office, an absurd errand at a shop where he is told to claim his name is "Sasha," and closing family news (their brother Nikolai’s ongoing carelessness with money and clothes, their uncle’s gift of a medal, Chekhov’s own poor health). Most strikingly, the letter ends not in prose but in a string of numbers and a mock arithmetic problem – doodled figures, dashes, and a nonsensical "formula" ("the multiplicand equals the multiplier divided by the parallelepiped") – apparently Chekhov idly playing with sums on the page, preserved here exactly as segmented in the source.