L. N. Trefolev, 30 September 1887. Moscow. 30 Sept.

1 Written from Moscow on 30 September 1887 to Leonid Nikolayevich Trefolev, the Yaroslavl poet and local-history writer with whom Chekhov had been corresponding since 1886. Trefolev, having just received a copy of Chekhov’s collection "In the Twilight" ("В сумерках"), had written back asking how he might repay the gift: with his own photograph, or with a copy of his rare booklet connected to "Uedinyonny Poshekhonets" ("The Solitary Poshekhonian"), an eighteenth-century provincial journal he had studied and reprinted. Chekhov’s reply plays along with mock greed, jokingly citing Hamlet’s advice to Polonius on treating people above their deserts, and promises to have the gift book bound and put into use.

2 The letter is a light, bantering piece of literary correspondence full of in-jokes about mutual acquaintances – the publisher Nikolai Leikin and the poet Liodor Palmin, at whose homes Chekhov had seen Trefolev’s portrait – and closes with an extended comic riff: Trefolev had joked about his own "illness" (an aversion to public displays, provoked by a newspaper piece on capital punishment) and asked for Chekhov’s portrait to hang on his wall; Chekhov offers mock medical treatment hours and then describes his Moscow address (a red house "shaped like a chest of drawers," its color jokingly called "liberal") before sending along the photograph itself, which he calls his "stolen mug."