To the Chekhovs, 10 March 1887. Petersburg.

1 Chekhov wrote this letter home to Taganrog-turned-Moscow family just after arriving in Petersburg in March 1887, summoned by an alarming telegram from his elder brother Alexander, who had imagined himself gravely ill. Chekhov found Alexander in perfect health but discovered real illness close at hand: Alexander’s common-law wife, Anna Ivanovna, was down with a mild case of typhoid fever, and a citywide typhus epidemic was killing people Chekhov knew, including the porter for his publisher and friend Nikolai Leikin.

2 The letter is written in Chekhov’s playful family idiom – addressed to "dear readers," full of private nicknames (Fyodor Timofeich the cat, Vasilisa the household help, "mamasha-tarakasha" for his mother), comic arithmetic over train fare and leftover bread, and greetings to the family’s menagerie ("the dog without a back"). Woven through the lightness are real anxieties: nightmares of coffins on the overnight train, the typhus outbreak, and the household’s habitual tight bookkeeping. He was reading Anna Karenina en route, and mentions dining with the Leikin family.