To Ya. A. Korneyev, October 1889. Moscow.

1 Dating and addressee. Mid-October 1889, Moscow. The recipient is Yakov Alexeyevich Korneyev, an acquaintance of Chekhov’s (identified in the standard Complete Works edition simply by name and patronymic; no further biographical apparatus is given in the source text itself).

2 A brief, jokey cover note. Chekhov forwards Korneyev a letter he has received from a certain "Mudry" ("the Wise One" — almost certainly a nickname or comic sobriquet rather than a real surname, though the source treats it as a proper name), who is described as a writer and a translator from Russian. Chekhov, with dry irony, suggests the letter’s clumsy, ungrammatical Russian is so striking that it deserves to be anthologized as a "specimen of the purest Russian language" — a backhanded joke, since the point is that the prose is in fact bad or foreign-sounding despite (or because of) its author’s claimed credentials as a translator. Chekhov then quotes, in section 7, his own reply to Mudry, itself written in a deliberately stilted, faux-elevated register ("Forgive me for having been late in answering your tender epistles, which I read with great graciousness") - Chekhov is performing/mocking the same overwrought, slightly malformed style he is needling Mudry about, as part of the joke.

3 It has an internal enclosure structure typical of Chekhov’s letters of this kind: (1) a cover note introducing an attached letter, (2) closing/signature, (3) a further instruction ("look on the back"), and (4) a quoted excerpt of Chekhov’s own reply to the third party.

6 Translator’s note. Section 7’s archaic/stilted phrasing ("ласковые письмена,с большою любезностью") was rendered with correspondingly stilted English ("tender epistles,great graciousness") to preserve the joke that Chekhov is imitating an affected, slightly incorrect elevated style — the same quality he is gently mocking in Mudry’s own prose.