To S. P. Kuvshinnikova, 25 December 1888. Moscow.
С. П. КУВШИННИКОВОЙ, 25 декабря 1888 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow on 25 December 1888, this short holiday note to Sofia Petrovna Kuvshinnikova is, as far as the surviving correspondence shows, the first letter Chekhov addressed to her – no earlier letter to Kuvshinnikova appears in this corpus. Sofia Petrovna was a Moscow physician’s wife and amateur painter who kept a well-known salon for writers, artists, and musicians; she is remembered above all as the close companion (and, by report, the mistress) of the landscape painter Isaac Levitan, a connection Chekhov later drew on, not altogether kindly, for the painter-heroine of his 1892 story "The Grasshopper" ("Poprygunya") – an association that reportedly cost him the friendship of both Kuvshinnikova and Levitan for a time. Nothing of that later falling-out is present here: the tone is warm and playful, consistent with Chekhov’s standing as a familiar guest in her circle already by the end of 1888.
Chekhov opens by excusing his absence from a gathering the previous day, blaming illness and a foul mood (3), then turns to the occasion for the note: Kuvshinnikova has had a painting accepted into a gallery, and Chekhov congratulates her on it as a kind of secular canonization – "entry into the ranks of the immortals" – before turning the small scale of the picture into a mock-patriotic parable about kopecks adding up to rubles, and small contributions of art and books accumulating into national wealth (4). He closes with greetings to her husband, addressed by name and patronymic as Dmitri Pavlovich (5) – this is Dr. Dmitri Pavlovich Kuvshinnikov, a Moscow police-precinct physician and the host, with his wife, of the artistic salon the couple kept – and passes along an invitation and greeting from his sister Maria Pavlovna, unnamed here but elsewhere identified simply as "sister" throughout Chekhov’s letters of this period (6), before the customary signed closing (7-8).
The note is slight in substance but useful as an early, undamaged data point for a friendship that later literary history remembers chiefly through the bitterness of "The Grasshopper"; nothing here anticipates that rupture.