To Ye. Ya. Chekhova, 4 May 1890. Ishim.

This brief letter was written on 4 May 1890 in Ishim, a town in western Siberia (present-day Tyumen Oblast), during the first weeks of Chekhov’s overland journey across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. He had left Moscow in late April 1890 and was travelling by train, river steamer, and horse-drawn conveyance; the crossing would take him nearly three months. The addressee is his mother, Yevgenia Yakovlevna Chekhova, and the letter is addressed via the family’s summer residence at Luka, an estate on the Psyol River near Sumy in Kharkov province (now Sumy Oblast, Ukraine) belonging to the Lintvaryov family, close friends of the Chekhovs who hosted them there in several summers.

The letter is a short, plain note of reassurance rather than a substantive travel account: Chekhov reports that he is alive and well, jokes about having taught himself to make coffee (too strong, by his own account – two spoonfuls to the cup instead of one), sends greetings to the family and to the Lintvaryovs, and remarks twice on the late Siberian spring – no greenery yet, frost, cold feet – underscoring how far north and how different the season is from what the family would be experiencing at Luka in early May. The doubled note about the absent greenery (and, as an apparent afterthought,) is characteristic of Chekhov’s terse travel correspondence: a single concrete physical detail repeated because it is the thing most present to him, not elaborated further. The closing sections (through) transcribe the address written on the back of the envelope, a pattern that recurs elsewhere in this corpus’s letter sources.

it carries a full closing formula ("Ваш уважительный сын А. Чехов" – "Your respectful son A. Chekhov"), a benediction ("Будьте здоровы. Не скучайте." – "Keep well. Don’t be bored."), and an addressed envelope transcription, none of which appear in this corpus’s telegrams. The terseness here is a function of Chekhov’s haste and travel conditions, not of the wire-telegram genre.