To V. A. Tikhonov, 22 February 1892. Moscow.

A letter of 22 February 1892 from Moscow to the playwright and journal editor Vladimir Alekseyevich Tikhonov (, if built), confirmed against the source as a single coherent eight-section document. It is one of a cluster of letters Chekhov wrote on this same date – to Bilibin, to Kondratyev, and to Shavrova among them – but its addressee, content, and tone are entirely its own; it is not a duplicate. Contents: dateline, short-form date, an apology for the delay in answering together with an account of a maddening estate purchase, reassurance about Tikhonov’s conduct at a recent name-day party, a comic mock-autobiography given in answer to a request for biographical facts, a closing quip, a valediction, and the signature.

Chekhov apologizes for his long silence, explaining that he has just returned from Voronezh province and is now consumed by the purchase of an estate (Melikhovo, though unnamed here), which he compares to a tavern binge that started as a modest meal and ended in a ruinously large bill, and to being seized by boa constrictors in the form of notarial deeds, mortgages, and liens. He then reassures Tikhonov that he had not disgraced himself at a name-day party held at the home of the playwright I. L. Leontyev, known by his pen name Shcheglov (, if built) – Tikhonov had evidently worried he had overdone his drinking, dancing, trick riding on a cabman’s box, and literary criticism delivered that evening; Chekhov assures him it was all harmless fun, recalling only that he and a companion named Vvedensky laughed a great deal at Tikhonov’s expense, without being able to say why. Asked, it seems, for biographical material (likely for a journal profile or reference entry Tikhonov was preparing), Chekhov supplies a deadpan comic autobiography: birth in Taganrog in 1860, schooling there, medical studies at Moscow University, the 1888 Pushkin Prize, the 1890 Sakhalin journey, a 1891 tour of Europe reduced to wine and oysters, and the year 1892 reduced to "making merry at a name-day party with V. A. Tikhonov"; a list of his story collections and the novella "The Duel"; a joke about being translated into every language except foreign ones (immediately undercut by noting he has in fact been translated by the Germans, Czechs, Serbs, and French); mock-solemn personal statistics (unmarried, wants a pension, still performs the occasional forensic autopsy); and closing preferences naming Tolstoy among writers and the physician Grigory Zakharyin (, if built) among doctors. Chekhov then waves the whole exercise off as nonsense and invites Tikhonov to invent whatever he likes, closing with wishes for good health and regards to Tikhonov’s daughters.