To N. A. Lei Kin, 5 October 1888. Moscow.
Н. А. ЛЕЙ КИНУ, 5 октября 1888 г. Москва.
Headnote
1 Written from Moscow on 5 October 1888 to the publisher and humorist Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor of "Oskolki" ("Splinters"), for which Chekhov had long written. Chekhov opens by reporting that he has just finished the story he had been laboring over all September for "Severny Vestnik" ("The Northern Herald") and is now catching up on correspondence, and asks whether Leikin is in town or at his dacha at Tosna, near St. Petersburg.
2 He thanks Leikin for a gift copy of "Down and Feathers" ("Пух и перья"), a collection of Leikin’s humorous sketches, praising its production and singling out a story about two shop clerks visiting their employer’s dacha. He then offers a considered comparison of two of Leikin’s novels: he ranks "The Satyr and the Nymph" ("Сатир и нимфа") below "Stukin and Khrustalnikov" ("Стукин и Хрустальников," here abbreviated by Chekhov in the source as "Стукина и Хр"), judging the former an easy, familiar, purely local Petersburg story populated by stock types, and the latter a more serious and original work – "almost the sole monument to the banking outrages of our time" – praising it for its larger design where "The Satyr" succeeds only in its particulars.
3 A brief anecdote follows: on a train along the Kharkov-Nikolayev railway line, Chekhov saw a fortune-telling "physico-chemical apparatus" – a glass cylinder holding a "sea creature" that, for five kopecks, dispensed a printed fortune – displaying sample photograph cards of celebrities, Leikin’s own portrait included among them, which Chekhov offers as a compliment to Leikin’s fame.
4 The letter closes with family and business matters: Chekhov’s brother Nikolai (the painter) is currently living with him, working steadily and having just made a drawing Chekhov recommended for "Oskolki"; Chekhov asks that any fee or parcel for Nikolai be routed not to Nikolai or to Chekhov himself but to their younger brother, Mikhail Chekhov (then a university student), since Chekhov has no time to collect the mail himself. Chekhov sends regards to Leikin’s wife, Praskovya Nikiforovna, his son Fedya, and to Viktor Viktorovich Bilibin, another "Oskolki" contributor.