To P. I. Chaykovsky, 18 October 1891. Moscow.

Written from Moscow on 18 October 1891, from the Firgang house on Malaya Dmitrovka, to the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It is a letter of recommendation: Chekhov, who had been personally acquainted with Tchaikovsky since the two exchanged admiring correspondence around the 1889 dedication of Gloomy People to him, writes on behalf of a friend, the cellist Marian Semashko, a former student of the Moscow Conservatory then without a settled position. Chekhov asks Tchaikovsky to use his influence to help Semashko find a post – in one of the capitals, in the provinces (Kharkov is suggested as an example), or abroad – and notes that the conductor and pianist Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kashkin, a Conservatory colleague of Tchaikovsky’s, can vouch for Semashko personally. Chekhov frames the request with the self-conscious apology characteristic of his letters asking favors of well-placed acquaintances, professing reluctance to trouble Tchaikovsky and begging pardon twice, at the start and close of the letter.

The middle of the letter turns briefly to Chekhov’s own affairs: he reports himself alive and well, writing much but publishing little, and mentions that his novella The Duel is about to begin serialization in Novoye Vremya – he asks Tchaikovsky not to read it there but to wait for the book edition, expected in early December. He adds that his account of the Sakhalin journey is not yet ready. These lines place the letter squarely in the autumn of 1891, while Chekhov was finishing The Duel and still working toward what would become The Island of Sakhalin.