To N. N. Obolonsky, 29 April 1890. Yekaterinburg.

it opens with a dateline, moves through a sustained comic congratulatory address with salutation ("dearest, kindest, and most golden Nikolai Nikolaevich"), and closes with a full valediction and signature ("Your A. Chekhov"). it is followed immediately by continuous prose ("Hurrah!!"... "Sending a telegram...") that only makes sense as one letter. No structural break or second signature appears anywhere in the source

Chekhov wrote this nine days into his journey east to Sakhalin (he had left Moscow on 21 April 1890), from Yekaterinburg, the first major stop where the trans-Ural crossing put him, as he jokes, with "one leg in Europe and one in Asia." The occasion is the wedding of his close friend and personal physician Dr. Nikolai Nikolaevich Obolonsky to Sofya Vitalyevna, taking place near the station of Vorozhba (in present-day Sumy Oblast, Ukraine) – Chekhov explains in section 4 that he decided against wiring congratulations because the ceremony itself was 37 versts from the station and a telegram might not reach the couple in time, opting to write instead.

The letter is warm, jocular, and self-deprecating in the register typical of Chekhov’s letters to intimates: he contrasts the newlyweds ("celestial beings") with himself and other ordinary mortals ("amphibians"), toasts their health "mentally," and wishes them, in a comic exaggeration built on the old serf-census idiom of counting people in "souls," eighteen children of both sexes.