To Ye. M. Lintvareva, 6 September 1889. Moscow.

Written the day after Chekhov’s family returned to Moscow from Luka, the Lintvarev estate in the Sumy district of Kharkov province where they had spent the summer of 1889 – a stay clouded by the death, in June, of Chekhov’s brother Nikolai. The addressee, Elena Mikhailovna Lintvareva, was the eldest daughter of the Lintvarev family, a practicing physician (hence "dear and kindest doctor") and blind; the Chekhovs had rented a wing of the Lintvarevs’ house for several summers running and the household had become close family friends. The letter is a single continuous piece in Chekhov’s familiar comic-affectionate register with his intimates: travel report, teasing anecdotes, an extravagant mock-devotional flourish, greetings to the household staff, a risque half-joke about rent, and a one-line postscript pun.

Content: the family’s train journey from the Luka area back to Moscow (section 4) – a meal en route, and Chekhov’s sister Masha (Maria Pavlovna) pointedly ignoring him and his travelling companion Semashko because her former university examiner, Professor Storozhenko, shared their carriage; Chekhov retaliates by loudly play-acting a servant’s patter about a fictional "Countess Keller." Section 5 is an elaborate mock-liturgical compliment to Elena Lintvareva and her sisters, comparing them to "holy wives and maidens" and offering to write them an akathist (a genre of Orthodox devotional hymn) – deliberately overblown, characteristic of Chekhov’s habit of needling pious or solemn forms for comic effect; readers should not read it as sincere religious sentiment. Section 6 sends greetings to named estate staff and family and needles the Lintvarevs’ father, Yegor (Georgy) Mikhailovich, about a pig he was raising, then raises – semi-jokingly – an unpaid-rent grievance against Alexandra Vasilyevna over "the little wing" of the house they’d occupied, comparing it to what other tenants (Dekonora, Artemenko) reportedly paid; the phrase rendered "a ’bra lig’" is obscure in the source (flagged sic!) and may be a private joke, nickname, or a transcription/OCR artifact from the source text – it could not be resolved from context and has been left as a literal, marked transliteration rather than guessed at. Section 8 is an anecdote about the servant Ivan’s reaction to Valentina Nikolaevna’s skill at packing luggage. Section 9 is a bare one-line question about a Natalia Mikhailovna’s temperament (likely another Lintvarev-circle acquaintance, otherwise unidentified here). The letter closes conventionally (10-12) and ends with a one-line postscript pun (13), "Посылаю Вам свою erysipelas" ("I am sending you my erysipelas") – erysipelas is a bacterial skin infection; given Elena Lintvareva’s medical practice, this is Chekhov (himself a physician) making a doctor-to-doctor joke, almost certainly a coy pun rather than a literal medical report, though it cannot be ruled out that he had or was joking about a minor ailment.