To M. M. Dyukovsky, 24 June 1889. Sumy.
М. М. ДЮКОВСКОМУ, 24 июня 1889 г. Сумы.
Headnote
1 Written from Sumy on 24 June 1889 to Mikhail Mikhailovich Dyukovsky, apparently a schoolmaster or official connected with the Meshchansky School (Meshchanskoye uchilishche) in Moscow, and a longtime family acquaintance from the Chekhovs’ student-boarder years in the late 1870s (he appears as one of the young men boarding with the family in letters from that period; see the headnote). Chekhov answers a letter of condolence from Dyukovsky with a detailed account of the death and funeral, a week earlier, of his elder brother Nikolai Pavlovich Chekhov ("Kolya"), a talented but dissolute painter who died of tuberculosis at not quite thirty, on the family estate at Luka near Sumy.
2 Chekhov describes Nikolai’s decline in unsparing physical detail – the advanced consumption he already had on leaving Moscow, weeks of sitting upright to breathe, constant coughing, and the sense that the outcome was foreseeable if not imminent. He is equally direct about his brother’s character: whatever "faults" Nikolai had in the past (a discreet reference to his drinking and general dissipation, a recurring family grievance in these years) he considers fully atoned for by his suffering. The final month is described as a genuine transformation – irritability giving way to gentleness and calm, persistent dreams of recovering and returning to painting, and long reminiscence with Chekhov about his relationship with Dyukovsky specifically. Nikolai received communion a week before he died and, notably, seems never to have consciously faced his own death.
3 A brief, almost clinical note on the death photograph follows, then a description of the funeral itself: an open-coffin procession carried by hand from house to church and church to graveside by local (southern-Russian) custom, without hired mourners or a hearse, church bells ringing as the coffin passed, burial in the quiet village cemetery, and a cross already raised over the grave by the next day. Chekhov notes that the family will hold a memorial service the following day, the ninth day after death – observing the Orthodox custom of prayers on the third, ninth, and fortieth days.
4 The letter then turns, in the space of a paragraph, from grief to the ordinary business of correspondence: family thanks and his mother’s tears on reading Dyukovsky’s letter; warm congratulations on Dyukovsky’s engagement or upcoming marriage; a promise to fill in the details in person rather than by letter, since the subject is too large for a page or two; family regards; and the signature. The letter closes with the envelope inscription – Dyukovsky’s address at the Meshchansky School near the Kaluga Gate in Moscow – preserved here as its own segment, as elsewhere in this corpus.