To N. N. Obolonsky, December 1889. Moscow.

Dated only approximately – late November or early December 1889, Moscow – this is a brief comic squib addressed to Nikolai Nikolaevich Obolonsky, a physician and old friend of the Chekhov family (he had treated Chekhov’s brother Nikolai and was close enough to the household to be a regular recipient of Chekhov’s joking notes). The piece is not really a letter so much as a mock official notice: Chekhov casts himself as an institution-like “undersigned,” comically overloaded with a cascade of absurd ailments (influenza complicated by “Mesopotamian plague,” glanders, hydrophobia, impotence, and every kind of typhus), who formally notifies an invented “venerable poet N.O.” that verses insulting Chekhov and his family will soon appear in print. The parody address and the exaggerated medical litany are typical of Chekhov’s short comic bagatelles of this period, several of which were sent to or shared with medical friends like Obolonsky, who would have appreciated the mock-clinical diction.

The internal addressee, “N.O.,” does not match Obolonsky’s own initials (N.N.) and is best read as a fictional stand-in inside the joke – an invented “venerable poet” who has slighted Chekhov and his relatives in verse – rather than a real third party; the letter is not concatenating two separate documents, just nesting a mock-address inside a real one. The “Picturesque Review” (Zhivopisnoe obozrenie) named as the venue for the poet’s supposed verses was a real illustrated Petersburg weekly of the period, invoked here purely for comic verisimilitude. The closing signature, “Blok \& Co.,” is a jokey collective pseudonym (not the poet Alexander Blok, who was a child at this date) continuing the mock-official, mock-commercial framing of the whole piece.