To A. I. Smagin, 13 November 1891. Moscow.

This is a three-line note, written in Moscow on 13 November 1891 to Alexander Ivanovich Smagin, a Poltava-province landowner connected to the Lintvarev family of Luka, near Sumy, whose summer house Chekhov and his family had rented for two seasons. It belongs to a short, urgent run of letters from the autumn and winter of 1891 in which Chekhov is hunting, by post and by proxy, for a small country property – a "khutor," a modest farmstead or homestead holding rather than a grand estate – somewhere in the south. Worn down by a bad case of influenza that settled into his lungs that November and December, and increasingly impatient with Moscow, he had deputized Smagin to scout land and negotiate on his behalf; a companion letter to Natalya Lintvareva written the day before reports that "Smagin is already angling for some khutor or other." The search would end the following March, not with a purchase through Smagin but with Melikhovo, the estate near Moscow Chekhov bought instead – so this note catches him still mid-search, his attention fixed on the south.

The letter itself is almost nothing: an instruction to forward something ("Send it to me"), an impatient line about the long-promised report on the property, and a greeting to Smagin’s relative by marriage, Elena Ivanovna Lintvareva, the family matriarch at Luka, whom Chekhov elsewhere salutes with similar brevity. There is no signature flourish, no news, no commentary – just the bare transaction of a man managing a piece of business at a distance while too unwell and too busy to write more. The terseness is not incidental; it is exactly the kind of note Chekhov fired off by the dozen in these years, dashed between patients, proofs, and correspondence with editors, and it is worth reading as such: not a literary letter but a working one, useful chiefly for dating the khutor search and for the glimpse it gives of how briskly Chekhov could close a transaction in three sentences and a name.