To A. S. Kiselev, 20 October 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 20 October 1888 to Aleksey Sergeyevich Kiselev, co-owner (with his wife Maria Vladimirovna Kiseleva) of the Babkino estate where the Chekhov family had summered. This letter is a health-and-conduct bulletin about the Kiselevs’ son "Finik," who was boarding with the Chekhovs in Moscow to attend school – the same boy, also called "Finik," who is the subject of the earlier notes to his mother of 17 and 23 September 1888 (letters 484 and 485). There Chekhov reassured the traveling Kiseleva about her son’s health from mother to mother; here he gives her husband a much longer, more detailed account of the same boy’s minor ailments, a health scare, his reluctance to write letters, and his good spirits, addressed "your Finik" (Вашего Финика). Do not confuse this "Finik" with the unrelated nickname of the same word used inside the Chekhov family itself in the 15 February 1888 letter to this same Kiselev (letter 377), where "Финик" denotes a Chekhov sibling, not the Kiselevs’ son – see that letter’s headnote for the distinction. This letter confirms the identification made in 485: Kiseleva’s boarding son is consistently called "Finik" by the Chekhov household, whether the bulletin goes to the mother or, as here, to the father.

2 The letter opens on a comic note, mock-diagnosing a run of trivial complaints (stomachache, a scratchy throat from shouting, a twinge under the breastbone) as "little lady-of-the-manor ailments" – Chekhov’s ironic phrase for fussy, minor symptoms, playing on his own medical training. He then narrates, at some length and with physician’s precision, a scare: Finik goes to bed early and silent one evening, wakes asking for water at 1 a.m., and by morning is running a 39C fever, prompting alarm from his mother and older sister (both staying in Moscow with him) and a mock-differential diagnosis of typhus or diphtheria from Chekhov – resolved comically when the cause turns out to be a kidney sauce eaten the day before, treated with castor oil, and the boy is fully recovered and boisterous by the next morning. A parade of a house cat balanced on the boy’s twitching stomach muscles ("the mine") and a visit from Finik’s form-master, Kozachkov, close out the anecdote. Chekhov then explains, gently and without irony, why Finik does not write his parents letters himself (inexperience, not neglect), reports that the boy has been marched out with his schoolmates to see the Tsar’s arrival in Moscow, and closes with praise for the boy’s sincerity and warm regards to the Babkino household.