To Al. P. Chekhov, 27 March 1887. Moscow.

1 This brief note from Moscow, written on 27 March 1887, belongs to a worried exchange between Anton and his elder brother Alexander, who was then living in Petersburg. An earlier letter in the same run shows Alexander reassuring the family that he himself had not caught typhoid fever; here Anton, writing as a doctor as much as a brother, is anxious for news of "A.I." – almost certainly Anna Ivanovna Khrushchova-Sokolnikova, Alexander’s common-law wife – who appears to have fallen ill with the disease. Chekhov also presses for word about a packet of material he had sent for a book, a reference to the collection of stories Suvorin was then preparing to publish for him.

2 The letter is short and businesslike, closing with the folded, undated form typical of Chekhov’s family correspondence: a signature, then – because the sheet doubled as its own envelope – the recipient’s address copied out on the reverse, Kavalergardskaya Street in Petersburg. The clinical aside on bronchitis and phlegm as ordinary complications of typhoid, and the flat warning that recovery cannot come in one or two months, is characteristic of how readily Chekhov’s medical training surfaces even in the most private and hurried notes.