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

Written to Fyodor Shekhtel, the architect who would go on to design some of Moscow’s most celebrated Art Nouveau buildings and who was, at this stage, one of Chekhov’s closest friends and occasional illustrator of his early comic sketches. Chekhov has just returned to Moscow from a long trip south to his native Taganrog and the Don steppe – the journey that produced the travel sketches later folded into "The Steppe" – and dashes off this note announcing his arrival and proposing a Monday visit.

The letter is a rapid-fire scrap of private shorthand rather than a composed piece: a joking self-description ("my sunburnt mug"), congratulations on Shekhtel’s engagement, a request for a small loan to pass along to Shekhtel’s best man, a fragmentary Latin flourish ("Idem," left mid-thought), a lone stray period standing as its own line, and a closing one-line question about "the Spaniards" that is almost certainly a private joke or running reference between the two friends whose meaning does not survive. The text preserves these oddities – including the isolated period – exactly as segmented from the source edition, rather than smoothing them into continuous prose.