To Al. P. Chekhov, 5 April 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 5 April 1888 to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov in Petersburg. Alexander lived there with Anna Ivanovna Khrushcheva-Sokolnikova, his common-law wife, who was seriously ill; the letter opens with brisk, half-mocking medical advice about her case and a push to get her seen by the well-known Petersburg physician Sergei Botkin.

2 Between family business – their mother’s health and lack of a passport, and the cheap-paper economics of a planned edition Chekhov was arranging with the publisher Alexei Suvorin – Chekhov turns grimly comic about a sick dog (Korbo) and closes with a direct, unusually earnest plea to Alexander: to bear patiently with Anna Ivanovna’s illness-driven irritability, so that his conduct through her ordeal leaves no regrets in memory. Family greetings follow in other hands, from their brother Nikolai and sister Maria.