To Al. P. Chekhov, 13 October 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 13 October 1888 to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander, a journalist on Suvorin’s newspaper "New Times." It opens with news that Chekhov has won the Pushkin Prize and moves quickly into a mock-scolding review of a drunken episode in Alexander’s own recent conduct, which Suvorin had reported to Chekhov by letter.

2 Chekhov shares the prize news and needles Alexander for failing to place a book advertisement to go with it, then addresses at length a report that some officer had beaten Alexander after the latter, drunk, made a scene – Chekhov says he smoothed the story over with Suvorin and lectures Alexander on drinking honestly and openly rather than lying about it. He mentions a leading article he placed with Suvorin’s paper, passes along family and business news (a relative’s marriage, a request for copies of his own books and of Bezhetsky’s "On the Road"), delivers a pointed comparison of Alexander to their father’s own tendency to overexplain himself to people who hadn’t asked, and closes with a plan to buy a farmstead once book sales improve, then the sign-off wishing Alexander well and sending regards to "the pups."

3 "Suvorin" is Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, Chekhov’s publisher, who reported the officer incident to Chekhov by letter; his unnamed father-in-law is invoked twice as an example of a heavy but open drinker, distinct from Suvorin himself. "à la Mitrofan Yegorovich" (6) compares Suvorin’s naive question about "binge-drinking" to the manner of the Chekhov family’s own uncle in Taganrog, Mitrofan Yegorovich Chekhov, established elsewhere in this correspondence as a kindly, guileless figure – the phrase characterizes Suvorin’s tone, not a claim that the uncle himself is involved in this incident. "Fyodorov,Gay," and "Zhitel" (6,) are three distinct men associated with the "New Times" circle – Zhitel is the established pen name of the columnist Alexander Dyakov; Gay and Fyodorov are otherwise unidentified colleagues, kept as separate names so neither is conflated with the other or with Suvorin. "M. M. Chokhov" (10) is a distinct, otherwise-unidentified relative sharing the family’s joking surname-variant "Chokhov" already established in this correspondence as a byword for a certain kind of fool; here it is used as an actual person’s name for a relative who is marrying, not as the mocking epithet, and the two uses should not be conflated. "Pokrovsky,Alferachikha," and "Shcherbina" (13) are three separate, otherwise-unidentified acquaintances of the Chekhov father, Pavel Yegorovich (called "the old fater," a Germanic-inflected family nickname, in the same section) – kept distinct in translation. Bezhetsky (12) is the established pen name already used elsewhere in this correspondence; his book title "По пути" is rendered literally as "On the Road.Цуцыкам" (15, "the pups") is the same affectionate-derisive family idiom for Alexander’s young sons used throughout this correspondence and is kept as "the pups" here.