To K. S. Barantsevich, 22 April 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 22 April 1889 to the writer Kazimir Stanislavovich Barantsevich, one of the contemporary prose writers Chekhov elsewhere groups with himself, Korolenko, and others as literary "staff-officers". The letter is a short, high-spirited invitation to Chekhov’s summer quarters at the Lintvaryova family estate near Sumy, in the same vein as – and addressed to a name already glimpsed among the "other guests" of – the household described at length.

2 Chekhov opens with the double dateline (1-2) seen elsewhere in this stretch of the corpus, then (3) announces he is leaving for the dacha the next day, gives the address as "Sumy, the Lintvaryova estate" (the same as the previous summer), and urges Barantsevich, in mock-imperious terms, to get leave from his employer (jokingly styled the board of "your horse-tramway") and come at once, with an extended comic threat of eternal punishment if he refuses. He appeals (4) to Barantsevich’s sense of sacrifice for the "great idea" of a "climatic station for the writing brotherhood," reassures him (5) that the two wings just rented from the Lintvaryovs leave plenty of room and that he and the poet Pleshcheyev have been the most agreeable of the household’s guests, closes (6) with affectionate regards to Barantsevich’s wife and, jokingly, to unnamed household pets or children ("the little geese and ducklings"), asks (7) whether a Lintvaryov son has called on Barantsevich and passed along a copy of Chekhov’s own story collection "In the Twilight," and signs off with a mock-formal valediction and signature (8-9).

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.