To F. O. Shekhtel, 1 December 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 1 December 1888 to Franz (Fyodor) Osipovich Shekhtel, the architect and stage designer who was one of Chekhov’s closest Moscow friends throughout the 1880s. As in that earlier note, Shekhtel had apparently written suggesting he was imposing on Chekhov, and this short reply both dismisses that worry and continues to report on the doings of Chekhov’s troublesome brother Nikolai.

2 Chekhov opens by swearing that Shekhtel’s fear of being a bother to him is groundless. He then turns to Nikolai, joking that he might still be tracked down at the Meshchansky School with Dyukovsky, or with the poet Liodor Ivanovich Palmin (whose own address is unknown), and that wherever Nikolai has found himself an "Arkadia" – a pleasure garden of the kind Chekhov elsewhere associates with carousing – Chekhov cannot begin to guess; he quips that this is not Nikolai Chekhov but Cagliostro, the legendary charlatan and escape-artist. Chekhov reports that he leaves for Petersburg the next day, and predicts that Nikolai will come home the moment he is gone; he confides, in an aside marked "secretly," that Nikolai had borrowed a little money from him, promised to repay it, and is probably now waiting for Chekhov’s departure out of embarrassment. He closes with a brief farewell, a wish for Shekhtel’s peace and well-being, an offer to run any errands for him in Petersburg, and his signature.