To I. P. Chekhov, May 1889. Sumy.
И. П. ЧЕХОВУ, Конец апреля или начало мая 1889 г. Сумы.
Headnote
1 Written from Sumy in late April or early May 1889 to Chekhov’s brother Ivan Pavlovich, a schoolteacher in Moscow, a few days after Chekhov’s own arrival that season at the Lintvaryov estate on the Psyol. This is one of the letters from the family’s last summer together before the death of Chekhov’s brother Nikolai, who is described here in an anxious, guardedly hopeful aside.
2 The letter is a short, list-like household note in Chekhov’s telegraphic vacation register. It opens (2) with a shopping-and- errand list addressed jointly to a M. R. Semashko and to Ivan himself, asking them to bring a forgotten fish-trap, the May issue of the journal "Severny Vestnik" ("The Northern Herald"), fishing hooks on horsehair leaders, sausage, wine, and steel pens. A run of quick impressions follows (3-7): fine weather and good crayfish-fishing; a poor local theater, dull audiences, and bad Santorini wine; younger brother Misha off in Taganrog showing off his outfit to young women; brother Nikolai "in his former state" but looking somewhat better and less gaunt than during a recent period of going hungry, his affairs still not good, his temper imperious ("generalskii"); the Lintvaryov family thriving and Chekhov himself writing daily; the economist V. P. Vorontsov visiting daily and well liked; a mock-scolding aside that anyone who could travel south, or to the Paris exhibition, and doesn’t is a fool, since life is short. The letter closes (8-9) on a different note, admitting boredom and ill temper despite the fine weather and the beauty of the Psyol, before brief closing greetings (with special mention of "Papasha," the boys’ father) and a plain signature.
4 No corruption or editorial gap markers appear in the source. there is no sign of archival concatenation with unrelated back-matter of the kind found in some other slots in this corpus.