To I. L. Leontyev, 16 March 1890. Moscow.

1 Written in Moscow on 16 March 1890 to Ivan Leontyevich Leontyev, the writer better known under his pen name Shcheglov ("Jean" or "milyi Zhan" is Chekhov’s habitual nickname for him, playing on the French "Jean" and his surname). This is one of the best-known letters from the weeks before Chekhov’s departure across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, and it lays out his full itinerary in a single breathless sentence: overland via Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Tyumen, Tomsk, Irkutsk, and Sretensk, then down the Amur River to Nikolaevsk, two months on Sakhalin itself, and a sea voyage home by way of Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hankou, Manila, Singapore, Madras, Colombo, Aden, Port Said, Constantinople, and Odessa. Chekhov jokes about the dangers ahead (bears, convicts, typhoons, the heat of Aden), proposes half-seriously that Shcheglov join him, and invents mock titles for travel pieces they might co-write along the way. He closes with regards to Shcheglov’s wife.

2 A short, high-spirited letter written in the comic-hyperbolic register Chekhov used with close literary friends, mixing real logistical detail (the itinerary, the address "Tserkovnaya ulitsa" appended almost as an afterthought) with pure whimsy (the invented vaudeville titles, the fantasy of catching a "Japanese wife" in Japan). The muse-in-blue-spectacles conceit signals Chekhov’s self-image at this moment: temporarily setting aside belles-lettres for the "ethnography and geology" of the Sakhalin project.