To Ya. A. Korneyev, 9 September 1887. Moscow.

1 Written 9 September 1887 in Moscow, this is a note to Ya. A. Korneev, who appears to have been the landlord (or his agent) of the apartment where Chekhov and his family were then living. Rent was a chronic sore point for the Chekhovs in these Moscow years, and the note reads as a jokey, face-saving dodge sent in lieu of the money actually owed.

2 The piece is a tiny comic performance in miniature: it opens with a mock liturgical salutation lifted from Church Slavonic devotional language (“Most long-suffering and most merciful one, who lovest the righteous and hast mercy on sinners”), as though addressing God rather than a landlord, before pivoting to bathos – offering a “volume of my excrement” (a self-deprecating jab at his own writing) in place of rent, promising payment “in a hundred years,” and daring Korneev to sue.