To E. M. Lintvareva, 27 October 1888. Moscow.
E. M. ЛИНТВАРЕВОЙ, 27 октября 1888 г. Москва.
Headnote
1 Written from Moscow on 27 October 1888 to Elena Mikhailovna Lintvaryova, the eldest of the Lintvaryov sisters and a physician at the family’s Sumy estate, Luka. This is the second letter in the corpus addressed directly to Elena Mikhailovna herself, following of 9 October; the easy, teasing, doctor-to-doctor register established there continues here – he opens by chiding her (in mock offense) for leaving a price off her accounting, and repeatedly addresses her as "doctor."
2 Business first: Chekhov asks Elena Mikhailovna to write back with the cost of the plakhtas (the traditional Ukrainian woven skirt-wraps she was evidently buying for him, per) and offers to run any errand she needs in return. He then reflects wryly on the Pushkin Prize he had just been awarded (announced 9 October, discussed at length in): here he likens it to a minor civil-service decoration, useful only as a line in his official record should he ever be conscripted as an army doctor.
3 He turns to his health – several days of coughing blood, now subsided to a minor cough – and rebuffs, half-joking, her prior advice to "take measures" without specifying which; he proposes they drop the subject, along with a private reference he calls "the Epoch," entirely. He reports an idle October devoted to correspondence and journalism rather than fiction, including a short obituary tribute to the explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky (who had died that autumn) published that day in "Novoye Vremya." He then professes not to understand a phrase of hers about "the motives that guide noble and elevated souls," disclaiming any motives beyond avoiding debt and waiting out the winter in Moscow before fleeing to idleness in spring. He closes with plans to visit Petersburg in November, warm regards to her household, a mock-oriental blessing, his signature, and a postscript of household news: praise for a "Lidia Fyodorovna" of the Luka circle, a hopeful word about a pianist acquaintance of Elena Mikhailovna’s, a boast about his own unfailing "prophetic sense," and a closing note that he is off on his medical rounds in the cold.