To Al. P. Chekhov, 6 November 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 6 November 1888 to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander Pavlovich, a journalist on Suvorin’s newspaper "New Times." A short, business-heavy catch-up letter after a gap in correspondence, mixing money worries, family news, and a domestic concern about a household member.

2 Chekhov apologizes for his long silence, blaming laziness, boredom, and lack of money, and reports he has already spent the bill of exchange Alexander sent him. He gives his travel plans (he expects to visit at the end of November or start of December, probably with their sister), asks whether young Suvorin passed along his regards after a recent stay as a guest, and works through a run of financial items: the Pushkin Prize money is still five or six weeks off, he asks Alexander to collect and forward any money owed him for "Twilight," notes that "Severny Vestnik" owes him roughly 300 roubles and is withholding it (calling this a secret), and reports a small raise in his per-line rates for fiction versus journalism. He asks for Alexander’s home address, vouches for young Suvorin’s discretion, and mentions that his play "The Bear" is playing to success. The letter closes with two remarks about the household: a request that Alexander take the still-mute Nikolka to see a psychiatrist, since the boy seems otherwise entirely normal, and a note that Nikolka is now in a fix because the authorities are demanding his identity papers.

3 No graphic content; the letter is entirely business and domestic chat. One point needs a careful disambiguation. "Nikolka" in–15 is NOT one of Alexander’s young sons – those are addressed collectively and separately in the same sentence as "the pups" (цуцыки, the family’s established affectionate-derisive nickname for Alexander’s sons throughout this correspondence, e.g.) – and is also NOT the brothers’ painter uncle Nikolai (Nikolai Pavlovich Chekhov, "Kolka"/"Nikolka" in the much earlier Taganrog-era letters to their father’s household, e.g.). Within Alexander’s own household in this period, "Nikolka" is a household servant or dependent boy already established in this correspondence as mute or slow to speak and a repeated subject of concern – distinct from Alexander’s sons, who are always "the pups" when Chekhov means them. The two are addressed side by side in ("Bow to the pups. If Nikolka still goes on being mute...") which is itself internal evidence they are different people: Chekhov would not send greetings to a group that includes the very individual he then discusses by name in the next clause. The concern about a speech delay serious enough to warrant a psychiatrist, followed in by an urgent demand for Nikolka’s identity papers (вид – an internal-passport/residency document required under Imperial Russian law, particularly for servants and lower-status dependents living away from their registered domicile), together read as consistent with Nikolka’s status as a servant or ward in Alexander’s household rather than a legal minor son, whose papers would not typically be at issue in the same way. No softening applied; the frank clinical language about the boy’s muteness is translated at full force per policy. "Suvorin-fils" / "young Suvorin" (6,) is the son of Chekhov’s publisher Alexei Suvorin, already established in this correspondence (e.g.) as distinct from his father and as a confidant Chekhov vouches for directly. "Severny Vestnik" ("The Northern Herald") is the journal that owed Chekhov the money mentioned in. "The Bear" (Медведь) is Chekhov’s own one-act farce, then in active production. The German aside in, "Was werde ich essen?" ("What shall I eat?"), is Chekhov’s own interpolation and is kept in German with a bracketed gloss, matching this corpus’s convention for his occasional foreign-language asides.