To M. V. Kiseleva, 23 September 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 23 September 1888 to Maria Vladimirovna Kiseleva, a family friend and writer who, with her husband Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev, owned the Babkino estate where the Chekhovs summered. This short bulletin is the direct companion to the letter of 17 September (letter 484): both are brief telegraphic notes sent to reassure the traveling Kiseleva about the health of her young son, whom the Chekhov household called "Finik" and who was boarding with the Chekhovs while attending school in Moscow. (This is the same "Finik" as in letter 484 – Kiseleva’s own son – and should not be confused with the unrelated "Finik" nickname used within the Chekhov family itself in letter 377, a different person entirely.)

2 Chekhov opens by reporting that Kiseleva’s husband and daughter have just arrived in Moscow, then gives the news she was waiting for: Finik is healthy, has no cough, and all is well; the family expects Kiseleva herself back by 1 October. He signs off with a comic, deliberately mangled version of the standard Russian idiom "by the grave of life" (i.e., "yours till death") – in the source he writes "по гроп жисти" instead of the correct "по гроб жизни," a playful folksy mispronunciation of his own invention, not a transcription error, rendered in English as an equivalently mangled "yours till the grave o’ life." A postscript adds that Finik earned top marks on a school exercise translating from Russian into Latin, which Chekhov jokingly credits to his own good influence.