To Al. P. Chekhov, 11 April 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 11 April 1889 to Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov, this is a short letter mixing family news, literary advice, and an affectionate joke-signature. It falls on the same day as the letter to Suvorin reporting the same medical news, and immediately after the letter to Leikin (, 10 April) describing the same illness in nearly identical clinical language – all three letters share the same underlying event.

2 After the double dateline (1-2), Chekhov opens with a mocking greeting, "A new Victor Krylov!" – apparently teasing Alexander about his playwriting ambitions by comparing him (ironically) to a prolific, commercially minded dramatist of the day (3). He explains his long silence: he has been putting off unpleasant news, namely that "Kosoy" fell ill around 25 March with typhoid fever complicated by a pulmonary process; Chekhov, a physician, has moved the patient into his own home and reports a consultation’s guarded, inconclusive prognosis (4). He notes that a trip to the Crimea would help but neither passport nor money is at hand (5). The letter’s longest section is literary advice for a play Alexander has apparently written: take it to Suvorin for a valuable opinion, make revisions before submitting to the censor, aim for originality and boldness over polish, avoid stale romantic-melodrama subjects, and remember that a play must also earn money for the family (6). Chekhov sends warm greetings to Alexander’s sons and to Natalya Alexandrovna, with a rueful aside about his own inability to do anything pleasant for them despite a comfortable income (7), closes with a plain well-wish (8), and signs off with a mock-formal Latin flourish, "Tuus magister bonus / Antonius XIII" (9-10), immediately glossed in the source with its own Russian translation, "Your good mentor / Antonius XIII (Latin)" (11-12).