To Al. P. Chekhov, 21 June 1887. Babkino.

1 Written from Babkino on 21 June 1887, five days after the previous letter, again to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander in Petersburg. Alexander had apparently asked, in some family quarrel, to be struck from the list of relatives; Chekhov answers with mock compliance, disowning him under a comic invented name. The letter continues the brothers’ running exchange about Alexander’s household in Petersburg, including the health of his common-law wife Anna Ivanovna, who was ill (Chekhov, a practicing physician, diagnoses her by mail with heavy sarcasm).

2 The letter is built, like its predecessor, as a numbered sequence of disconnected items in Chekhov’s clowning epistolary style: fake genealogy, a joke about foreign potentates reading Alexander’s work, mock-medical instructions in dog Latin, complaints of encroaching deafness, a swipe at "the Germans," and a dismissive verdict on a piece of writing (apparently Alexander’s) that he calls pleasing only through "optical illusion" and technical tricks. It closes with garbled comic Latin-sounding names for Alexander’s children and the recurring joke that the letter is fit only for publication fifty years hence.