To N. A. Leikin, 25 December 1889. Moscow.

Written on 25 December 1889 from Moscow to Nikolai Aleksandrovich Leikin (1841-1906), the humorist and editor of the Petersburg magazine Oskolki (“Fragments”), for which the young Chekhov had written prolifically under the pen name Antosha Chekhonte in the early-to-mid 1880s. By 1889 Chekhov’s literary standing had risen well beyond Leikin’s magazine – he was now a Suvorin author and an established figure – but the two remained on warm, joking terms, and Leikin continued to send him gifts of books.

The letter is a short, chatty holiday greeting apologizing for a long silence: Chekhov thanks Leikin for two books sent as a gift (noting, half-teasingly, that they arrived without an expected facsimile), confesses in mock-self-accusing terms that he never wrote back or thanked him promptly, and blames the lapse on a running joke – he has been telling himself daily that he will finally make the trip to Petersburg "tomorrow." He promises to visit Leikin as soon as he arrives, staying with his publisher Alexei Suvorin, and jokes that he will come “incognito, in the manner of the Brazilian Dom Pedro” (a reference to Dom Pedro II of Brazil, deposed in November 1889 just weeks before this letter and much in the European press at the time, then reportedly traveling privately in Europe) so as to avoid a round of social calls. He closes with a question about subscription numbers to Leikin’s magazine, grumbling that the current theater-and-reading season is a bad one ("a lost season; one must set a cross upon it"), then sends holiday greetings to Leikin’s wife Praskovya Nikiforovna and son Fedya (Fyodor), and signs off simply as "Your A. Chekhov."