To K. S. Barantsevich, 2 December 1888. en route to Petersburg.

1 Written on 2 December 1888 "on the way to Petersburg" – that is, composed and posted while Chekhov was en route by train – to Kazimir Stanislavovich Barantsevich (1851-1927), a St. Petersburg prose writer associated with the "Novoye Vremya" ("New Time") circle that Chekhov himself wrote for. This note belongs to the November-December 1888 Petersburg trip that also produced the letters of late November and early December to Suvorin and others; Chekhov gives his own temporary address in the city simply as the "New Time" offices, expecting Barantsevich to call on him there. The playful closing image – that by the time the letter arrives Chekhov will "already be polishing the pavements of the Neva," i.e., already walking the streets of Petersburg – is characteristic of his travel notes from this period.

2 The letter is a short, practical arrangement to meet, hedged with the proviso that it will only reach Barantsevich if he is still at his previous year’s address (confirmed by the envelope, addressed to Peski, 3rd Street, no. 4, in Petersburg). Chekhov asks him to write back with a convenient hour. He then apologizes for having called him "Boleslavich" (a patronymic error) on some earlier occasion, blaming his own absent-mindedness and a mix-up with an acquaintance, a colonel actually named Boleslav – Barantsevich’s own patronymic is correctly Stanislavovich, as the salutation and envelope here confirm. He closes by excusing the letter’s plain paper, having had neither the time nor the means to find proper stationery while traveling. As in the earlier short notes to Dyukovsky and to Lazarev, the original preserves the address written on the reverse of the sheet, reproduced here as its own sequence of short sections following the same convention.