To M. N. Galkin-Vrasky, 20 January 1890. Petersburg.

A short, formal petition, written in Petersburg on 20 January 1890 to Mikhail Nikolaevich Galkin-Vraskoy, then head of the Main Prison Administration (Glavnoe tyuremnoe upravlenie) of the Russian Empire – the official body with jurisdiction over Sakhalin as a penal colony. Chekhov writes to announce his intention to travel that spring to Eastern Siberia "with scientific and literary aims," including a visit to Sakhalin Island (both its central and southern districts), and asks Galkin-Vraskoy’s assistance in facilitating the trip. This is one of the earliest documentary traces of the Sakhalin journey that Chekhov would undertake later that year (departing April 1890), and situates the expedition, from its first formal step, as licensed through the prison administration rather than as an informal or purely literary excursion.

The letter is entirely in the ritualized epistolary register of formal petition to a high-ranking official – "Your Excellency, gracious sir," closing "I have the honor to be Your Excellency’s most humble servant" – with no personal or informal content. The address given at the close, Malaya Italyanskaya 18, is the Petersburg apartment of Chekhov’s publisher and friend A. S. Suvorin, where Chekhov was staying at the time.