To the Chekhovs, 13 March 1887. Petersburg.

1 Written on 13 March 1887, this brief, breezy letter home to the family in Moscow finds Chekhov twenty-seven and on one of his early trips to Petersburg, where his reputation and his prospects were both rising fast. He reports on his health (recovered from a bout of low spirits and worry about money), the unseasonably mild weather, and – the real news – that Alexei Suvorin, the powerful publisher of Novoye Vremya, has both lent him money and commissioned a book collecting his stories for that paper: the arrangement that would soon make Chekhov’s name and fortune, and begin one of the defining relationships, personal and professional, of his career.

2 The letter is characteristically compressed and jocular, numbering its "surprises" like a business memo before dissolving into family banter – greetings to the household dog, a servant, and finally a note in the hand of his brother Alexander, who appends his own one-line postscript about a fire across the Neva. An editorial note preserved from the original autograph records that a paragraph of about five lines was cut before publication, a small reminder of how the family correspondence reaches us already filtered.

3 The letter contains a period-typical antisemitic idiom – Chekhov describes Suvorin’s generosity as done "po-zhidovski," literally "in kike-fashion," using the Russian slur zhid to characterize what he frames (however jokingly) as a moneylender’s shrewdness. The word and the stereotype it invokes are translated directly rather than softened; readers should be aware of this slur before encountering the text.