To M. V. Kiseleva, 28 January 1890. Petersburg.

1 Written from Petersburg on 28 January 1890 to Maria Vladimirovna Kiseleva, the family friend and writer of the Kiselev household at Babkino (see letters 3-548, 4-757, and their siblings for the established cast). This is one of a cluster of short notes Chekhov sent Kiseleva in the weeks before leaving for Sakhalin – he departed Moscow in late April 1890 – and its opening line ("At last I have left, Maria Vladimirovna!") announces that Chekhov has just departed Petersburg (where letter 4-757, two days earlier, shows him still working through borrowed Sakhalin research materials) and is on his way back toward Moscow. He explains he had meant to call on Kiseleva before leaving but ran out of time paying farewell visits.

2 The letter proper is short, warm, and joking throughout: Chekhov promises to thank Kiseleva’s husband, Valentin Yakovlevich (elsewhere in the corpus "Alexei Sergeyevich Kiselev" / "the Squire" – see the naming note below), in a future letter that will describe a visit to one "Zenzinov," not otherwise identified here. He expects to see "the Squire" and "Idiotik" (a recurring Kiselev-household nickname, see below) before Kiseleva does, and will pass on her news and a comic compliment from an unnamed "countess" calling her a "moral giant." He asks, in the letter’s most quotable joke, whether his "future wife" – a mock epithet for Kiseleva herself, playing on his real flight to Sakhalin as a flight from marriage – was pleased with an "Indian" gift he had sent, and threatens to follow it with a Japanese nodding-doll if not. He closes the letter proper with a mock-plea that Kiseleva and her daughter stop "persecuting" him, threatening (as a joke) to appeal to Gresser – Pyotr Apollonovich Gresser, the real Petersburg gradonachalnik (city police chief/prefect) of the period – and signs "A. Chekhov."

3 After the signature, three further short paragraphs continue in the same register, functioning as a postscript rather than a second document: further greetings to the Golubevs and to a "Vladimir Petrovich," a message for a "Vladislavlev" about Chekhov’s spring/ early-summer travel plans to Tomsk, and a closing request that Kiseleva write even one line to Moscow about her health, with an assurance that Chekhov is not being merely polite. The letter (and the source file) ends mid-sentence – "I forgot to ask you how" – with an editorial bracketed note in the original, "Конец письма не сохранился" ("The end of the letter has not survived"), indicating manuscript loss, not an authorial ellipsis; this bracketed editorial note is preserved in of the translation exactly as in the source, set off as editorial rather than Chekhov’s own words.