To Al. P. Chekhov, 16 June 1887. Babkino".

1 Written from Babkino, the Kiselyov family estate near Moscow where the Chekhovs summered, on 16 June 1887, to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander in Petersburg. Alexander was seeing a Chekhov book (a collection of humorous sketches) through the press, and this letter is Chekhov’s furious, half-comic reaction to a joke Alexander had apparently inserted into the proofs without permission – billing Anton as a "cavalier of Russian and foreign orders," a title he did not hold and found alarming rather than funny, since it risked drawing unwanted official attention.

2 The letter is built as a numbered list of business instructions – strike the offending phrase, mind the table of contents, stop sending registered mail, don’t bother copying out a story he already has, send author’s copies once the book appears – interleaved with Chekhov’s characteristic mock- threats and insults toward his brother, praise-with-criticism for Alexander’s own newspaper debut, and closing family greetings to Alexander’s common-law wife Anna Ivanovna (then unwell) and their children, teasingly called "Kikishes and Kokoshes."