To A. A. Kiselev, 17 September 1891. Moscow.

This is a telegram, not a letter in the ordinary sense, and it shows: a dateline, one word of substance, a signature, and the address as it was written on the telegraph blank itself. Chekhov sent it from Moscow on September 17, 1891, signing for the whole family – "The Chekhovs" – which places it among the brief, collective notes the household fired off to mark a birthday, a name day, or some other occasion calling for prompt congratulation rather than a proper letter.

The addressee is recorded in the source as A. A. Kiselyov. Chekhov’s regular correspondent at Babkino and after, the painter and amateur landowner who hosted the Chekhovs through several summers in the 1880s, was Aleksei Sergeyevich Kiselyov – "A. S.," not "A. A." – and the surrounding correspondence of these years runs almost entirely to him. Whether this particular telegram went to Aleksei Sergeyevich under a miscopied initial, or to a different Kiselyov entirely, the editorial record does not resolve; the translation preserves the initials exactly as the source gives them rather than silently correcting a relationship the text itself does not confirm.

What survives is small, but it is exactly what a telegram is for: speed over substance, the warmth in the gesture rather than in any sentence. The form’s own address line, copied here as Chekhov’s correspondence regularly preserves such markings, places the wire at Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, at the house of Meshcherinov – a fragment of 1891 Moscow geography surviving by accident, the kind of plain documentary detail Chekhov’s letters are full of and his fiction never wastes.