To F. O. Shekhtel, 11 April 1887. Taganrog.

1 Written on 11 April 1887 from Taganrog, Chekhov’s home town, at the start of the long southern journey (through the Donets steppe and the Crimea to the Caucasus) that would feed directly into "The Steppe" the following year. The addressee is Fyodor Osipovich Schechtel, the architect and stage designer – later famous as the leading figure of Moscow Art Nouveau – who was one of Chekhov’s closest friends and correspondents in the mid-1880s, hence the joking honorific "Maestro."

2 The letter is a rapid burst of travel-grumbling comedy: cold wind, stomach trouble, bad food, filthy streets, and a dislike of the local population, all itemized in short clipped sentences. It moves through private in-jokes about a return train ticket, a debt ("пручент," a mock-mangled form of the word for percentage/interest), and a barbed compliment to Schechtel’s talent as an architect – Chekhov says if he were that good he’d tear Taganrog down. It closes with a glancing reference to a woman he is about to visit and a question about a mutual acquaintance’s dogs.