To F. O. Shekhtel, 17 March 1887. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 17 March 1887 to Fyodor Osipovich Shekhtel, an old schoolfriend from Chekhov’s Taganrog days and by this point a rising Moscow architect (he would go on to become one of the great masters of Russian Art Nouveau). Both men had evidently just returned to the city – Chekhov from a short trip to Petersburg, where he had received a telegram from Shekhtel and wired a reply to him at a hotel or restaurant called "La France" – and the note is a quick, playful check-in between friends rather than a piece of business.

2 The letter is tiny and high-spirited: a mock-grandiose Latin greeting ("Elegantissime,most elegant one"), a report of having settled back into his routine, an invitation to Shekhtel to call on him that evening, and a burst of comic resolve about a planned trip on the 31st – the reference is to the journey south to the Ukrainian steppe and the Donets basin that Chekhov made that spring, gathering material that would feed into "Steppe." He punctuates his determination with a mock-heroic vow to go even stricken with typhus, then closes with a triumphant postscript: his publisher Aleksei Suvorin has fronted him travel money.