To A. K. Sheller-Mikhaylov, 10 October 1888. Moscow.

This note of October 10, 1888, is one of the shortest items in Chekhov’s correspondence: four lines, sent jointly with the writer Ivan Shcheglov (the pen name of Ivan Leontievich Leontiev), to Alexander Konstantinovich Sheller-Mikhailov – a senior man of letters of the day, known under the pseudonym A. Mikhailov for a long run of socially minded novels in the Otechestvennye zapiski generation, and by 1888 a figure of some seniority in the Petersburg literary world. The occasion prompting the toast is not stated in the note itself and is not otherwise documented; the most likely context is a name day or similar private observance, the kind of date St. Petersburg and Moscow writers routinely marked with a telegram or a card rather than a letter proper.

1888 finds Chekhov in Moscow in the full flush of his arrival as a serious writer rather than a magazine comedian – The Steppe had appeared that spring, and the Pushkin Prize would follow within months. Shcheglov, a close friend from these Petersburg trips and one of the few literary men Chekhov addressed with real warmth, was very likely visiting Moscow or sharing a table with Chekhov when the two of them dashed this off together; the doubled signature and the slightly mock-formal "we" of "Сердечно Вас поздравляем" ("we heartily congratulate you") read as a shared joke between friends as much as a tribute to Sheller-Mikhailov himself.

There is no argument here and no scene – only the bare social gesture, preserved because it survives in the same archive as everything else Chekhov put on paper. It is worth reading precisely for its smallness: a reminder that the corpus of "Chekhov’s letters" includes not only the long literary and personal confidences to Suvorin or Pleshcheev but also the disposable courtesies of a working writer’s ordinary week.