To Ye. M. Lintvareva, December 1888. Moscow.

1 A short, playful New Year’s note from late December 1888, written from Moscow to Elena Mikhailovna Lintvaryova, one of the daughters of the widowed Lintvaryova family at whose Sumy estate on the Psel river Chekhov had spent the summer of 1888. The letter opens with a mock-formal flourish – Chekhov’s "surname," rather than Chekhov himself, has been deputized to send holiday greetings – and jokes that he is writing on unusually fine paper out of sheer vanity, finer even than what the wealthy Kharitonenko sugar-refining family could boast.

2 He reports having seen her brother often in Petersburg and judges him, from those meetings, to be living well and working; he adds that he has mentioned this brother to the composer Tchaikovsky, who wants to meet him (and probably already has), and offers the aside that Tchaikovsky is a good man, not the demigod his reputation might suggest. He closes with a blessing, a question about whether the Lintvaryovs received the Garshin memorial miscellany (which he reports is selling well), a signature, and two abrupt postscript-like lines – one mock-cursing the extravagant paper he is writing on, the other a bare complaint that he has no money.