To P. I. Chaykovsky, 12 October 1889. Moscow.

This is Chekhov’s letter to the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, written from Moscow on October 12, 1889, asking permission to dedicate his forthcoming story collection to him. The collection in question is Gloomy People (Хмурые люди), published later that year – the dedication was accepted, and the book duly appeared inscribed to Tchaikovsky.

Chekhov and Tchaikovsky had met a short time before through the composer’s younger brother, Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky (a playwright and librettist, referenced here as "Modest Ilyich"), at whose home the two breakfasted together – the occasion on which Chekhov learned Tchaikovsky had read his stories, and where the idea of the dedication first took hold. The two men had a mutual regard that would deepen slightly further over the following months (Chekhov later sent Tchaikovsky a copy of the published book and the two corresponded a little more), though this letter marks its real beginning.

The letter is brief and formal in the manner of a request to an eminent, much-older public figure: Chekhov, self-deprecating about his own stories ("dull and tedious, like autumn... their artistic elements thickly mixed with medical ones" – a characteristic joke on his day job as a physician), frames the dedication as an honor he is asking for rather than bestowing, and closes by half-jokingly asking for a photograph in return.