To N. N. Obolonsky, 4 June 1889. Sumy.
H. H. ОБОЛОНСКОМУ, 4 июня 1889 г. Сумы.
Headnote
1 Written from Sumy on 4 June 1889 to Dr. Nikolai Nikolayevich Obolonsky, the Moscow physician and family friend already well established elsewhere in this corpus. Chekhov opens with a mock-plea for clemency over his long silence, explaining he had not known whether Obolonsky was in Moscow or the Caucasus, had himself been planning a Caucasus trip with his sister, and had kept waiting for his brother Nikolai to finally write the "curriculum vitae" he had promised Obolonsky.
2 The bulk of the letter is a grim clinical bulletin on "the artist" – Chekhov’s brother, the painter Nikolai Pavlovich Chekhov, dying of tuberculosis at the family’s summer place near Sumy. Chekhov, himself a physician, reports Nikolai’s persistent fever, weight loss, unrelenting cough, vomiting, and now symptoms pointing to laryngeal disease – adding, with professional self-deprecation, that he has no laryngoscope in the whole district and asks Obolonsky for advice on inhalations. Woven between these clinical passages are lighter items: literary small talk and questions about Obolonsky’s life in Kislovodsk, news of a stalled three-act play commissioned for the Imperial Theaters (as against one already promised to Korsh for Svobodin’s and Lensky’s benefit performances), a running joke about a "season of guests" at Sumy (Suvorin, Svobodin, an unnamed cellist), a note on the summer drought and poor harvest, and small domestic details of Nikolai’s illness (a kitten, a half-finished painting on a wall clock face). The letter closes with family regards, an instruction to send Nikolai’s own letter separately, good wishes for Obolonsky’s Caucasus romances, the signature, and a one-line postscript giving Chekhov’s Sumy address.
4 No corruption or editorial gap markers appear in the source. There is no sign of archival concatenation with an unrelated document.