To Ye. M. Lintvareva, 17 April 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 17 April 1889 to Elena Mikhailovna Lintvaryova, one of the daughters of the widowed Lintvaryova family at whose Sumy estate on the Psel river (with its house called Luka) Chekhov had summered in 1888 and would again in 1889. The letter follows the double dateline pattern seen elsewhere in this stretch of the corpus (1-2, "17 April 1889. Moscow." and the shorthand "17 April"); a separate letter to the publisher Aleksey Suvorin, also dated 17 April 1889, was written the same day.

2 Chekhov opens with bad news (3): his brother, an artist, is seriously ill with the aftermath of typhoid complicated by a chronic lung process, running a persistent fever above 39 degrees Celsius; he plans to bring him south to the Lintvaryovs’ estate at Luka (the Crimea being unaffordable) and proposes arriving the following Sunday by express train, with a telegram code arranged for bad weather. He describes his own mood as foul, given the double burden of having a sick brother and being the doctor at that brother’s side (4). He reports dining in Moscow with the poet Alexei Pleshcheev, regrets that Pleshcheev will not visit Luka that summer, and notes that Professor Manassein has rented a dacha near Luka, prompting wry anticipation of medical consultations with so eminent (and, as the editor of a leading medical journal, intimidating) a colleague (5). He muses that if his brother Nikolai improves, he may spend June or July practicing medicine at Kislovodsk instead of writing (6), sends good wishes to the Lintvaryov family (7), signs off (8-9), and adds a closing postscript-like line noting a recent trip to Kharkov where he saw a certain Timofeyev (10).

4 No corruption or editorial gap markers appear in the source; the letter is complete and internally coherent as a single short document, with no sign of archival concatenation with unrelated back-matter.