To N. N. Obolonsky, 17 June 1889. Sumy.

1 Written from Sumy on 17 June 1889 to Dr. Nikolai Nikolayevich Obolonsky, the Moscow physician and family friend established throughout this corpus. This is the shortest and gravest letter in the sequence: a hurried note announcing the death of Chekhov’s brother, the painter Nikolai Pavlovich Chekhov, closing the long illness thread carried across this stretch of the correspondence since.

2 The letter opens with a double dateline (1-2) and then, in a single terse sentence, states the fact of the death and defers the particulars to a future letter or meeting, apologizing only for having to write in pencil (3) – a small, telling detail suggesting the note was dashed off at speed, likely without ink or a proper writing surface at hand, in the immediate aftermath. Chekhov then closes with a warm handclasp (4), a heartfelt valediction (5), and his signature (6). The remainder of the letter is address information written on the reverse of the note (7-10): Obolonsky’s Kislovodsk summer address at "Zherdeva’s Dacha."

4 No corrupted or garbled text was found in this letter; no editorial gap markers appear in the source. a double dateline, a one-sentence death announcement with an apology for the pencil, a closing handclasp, a valediction, a signature, and address information on the reverse, all addressed throughout to the same correspondent. There is no sign of archival concatenation with an unrelated document.