To M. M. Dyukovsky, 5 October 1888. Moscow.

1 This brief note of October 5, 1888, asks Mikhail Mikhailovich Dyukovsky – identified on the envelope as living at the Meshchanskoye School near the Kaluga Gate in Moscow, evidently a teacher or official there – to lend Chekhov a copy of the Address-Calendar of Moscow (Adres-Kalendar), an annual directory of the city’s residents, offices, and institutions, for a couple of days. Chekhov offers to send the item back promptly by messenger and adds that he would be glad to see Dyukovsky in person if he preferred to deliver it himself. The same Meshchanskoye School (a school for the meshchanstvo, the urban lower-middle estate of townspeople and petty tradesmen) appears independently in Chekhov’s correspondence from this period – a letter to Suvorin written five days later mentions the school’s inspector calling on Chekhov to congratulate him on the Pushkin Prize – which places Dyukovsky within Chekhov’s circle of Moscow acquaintances tied to that institution, though nothing further is known about him from the letters themselves.

2 The letter is a purely practical, almost errand-like note – one of many small requests and courtesies that make up the bulk of Chekhov’s day-to-day correspondence alongside the more famous literary and personal letters. As in several other short notes of the period, the original preserves the address written on the reverse of the sheet, following the etiquette of hand-delivered mail, which is reproduced here as its own sequence of short sections.