To A. S. Lazarev, 8 July 1887. Moscow.

This is a telegram, not a letter in the ordinary sense, sent on 8 July 1887 from Moscow to Alexander Sergeyevich Lazarev, who wrote under the pen name Gruzinsky – a young writer and fellow contributor to the comic weeklies who had become part of Chekhov’s circle of Moscow literary friends. The wire survives with its original telegraph-office annotations: the addressee’s form ("B Gruz," an abbreviation of the street, Bolshaya Gruzinskaya), the house and apartment number, and the recipient’s name as the post office recorded it. None of this is Chekhov’s prose; it is the bureaucratic skeleton that carried his four words to their destination, and the edition preserves it exactly because it is part of the historical document.

The message itself is telegraphic in the literal sense – no salutation, no punctuation, no signature flourish, just the bare fact and the name: he is expected this evening at seven. Chekhov’s wider correspondence from these months shows a man constantly proposing and confirming visits, dinners, and evenings out with the loose fraternity of young Moscow writers who orbited the humor magazines; this telegram is the smallest possible unit of that traffic, a single appointment fixed in five words because a letter would have arrived too late.

Slight as it is, the wire belongs in the corpus for the same reason the glancing notes and postcards do: Chekhov’s letters, read in bulk, are a running record of a life lived among people, and the brief mechanical ones are as informative about its rhythm and obligations as the longer literary and personal letters are about its mind. 1887 was the year of his growing reputation and his first real money from writing – the year that ends with the commission for Ivanov – and the casual sociability on display here, an evening fixed with a fellow contributor by wire rather than by post, is part of the texture of that year.