To F. O. Shekhtel, 5 June 1887. Babkino.

1 Written over two sittings, 4 and 5 June 1887, from the Kiselyov family’s estate at Babkino outside Moscow, where Chekhov and his family were spending the summer. The addressee, Fyodor (Franz) Schechtel, was a close friend from Chekhov’s Taganrog schooldays who went on to become one of Russia’s foremost architects; their correspondence mixes affectionate banter with the shorthand of old intimates, including references to shared acquaintances (Yashenka, Nikolai, Pyotr the watchman) that go unexplained because none was needed between the two men.

2 The letter is a compact specimen of Chekhov’s private comic voice: mock complaints about the cold and the insects at his dacha, a running joke about a trunk sent back "to the consumptives" because the southern climate apparently damages luggage, and a reflective aside on being a "rag" prone to emotional agitation, offered as reassurance to a friend who had just confided something similar. Several passages were physically crossed out by the addressee before the manuscript’s preservation – marked here as "several words crossed out by the addressee" – so parts of the correspondence’s more private content are irrecoverably lost; the source text likewise preserves two editorial ellipses marking omitted or illegible material.