To F. O. Shekhtel, 14 December 1891. Moscow.

Written from Moscow on 14 December 1891 to the architect Fyodor (Franz) Osipovich Shekhtel, an old friend from Chekhov’s days on the Moscow humor-magazine circuit in the 1880s. The two hadn’t been in close touch, and the letter opens with a rueful greeting – "what winters, what years!" – before Chekhov gets down to business.

That business is famine relief. The winter of 1891-92 saw a severe famine across the Volga and central Black Earth provinces, and Chekhov had thrown himself into organizing aid for Nizhny Novgorod province, where a friend (the zemstvo chief Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov, named here as a point of contact) was doing the on-the-ground work while Chekhov handled fundraising and logistics from Moscow, joking that he was playing "a lady bountiful." He asks Shekhtel not for money outright but for a standing promise: to catch and redirect any stray ruble raised at parties, anniversaries, or weddings he happens to attend over the winter, forwarding it either to Chekhov’s Moscow address or straight to Yegorov in the field. The promise of a itemized, seal-stamped receipt "adorned with the flowers of my belletristic talent" is characteristic Chekhov self-mockery about his own fame being put to bureaucratic use.

The letter then turns personal and buoyant: Chekhov reports he is still unmarried, not rich, and worn down by a bout of influenza that has left him thin and hollow-cheeked – but he’s plotting an escape from Moscow altogether, toward the farmstead in Poltava province that would become Melikhovo the following spring (he in fact bought Melikhovo, in Moscow province, not Poltava, but at this point the plan was still unsettled). He recalls his recent trip abroad – gambling away 900 francs at roulette and climbing Vesuvius to look into the crater – with the same deflating irony he brings to the charity work, before closing with an open invitation to dinner at Testov’s, a well-known Moscow restaurant, leaving the choice of tavern entirely to Shekhtel.