To the Chekhovs, 28 May 1890. Krasnoyarsk.
ЧЕХОВЫМ, 28 мая 1890 г. Красноярск.
Headnote
A family letter written from Krasnoyarsk on 28 May 1890, roughly three weeks into Chekhov’s overland journey across Siberia toward the penal colony on Sakhalin. He had left Moscow by rail in April, then continued by horse-drawn carriage (tarantas) over the Siberian post road once the rail line ran out; this letter catches him at a way station partway across, having just fought through the spring mud of the Tomsk region. No single addressee is named on the letter itself, but the closing instructions make clear it is meant to circulate through the whole household at the Lintvaryov estate near Sumy, with his sister Maria (Masha) as gatekeeper for anything private; addresses his brother Mikhail (Misha) directly by name mid-letter, in the loose, multiple-addressee manner typical of Chekhov’s travel correspondence home.
The letter is built from short, list-like bursts rather than sustained narrative: a report on a broken carriage and the state of the road; praise for Krasnoyarsk against Tomsk’s expense; reassurance that he and his belongings are intact; a name-by-name list of greetings to family, neighbors, and household staff at the Lintvaryov estate; a wry inventory of provisions and prices as goods get more expensive heading east; travel company (two lieutenants and an army doctor bound for the Amur, which Chekhov jokes makes his revolver pointless); a passing note on Krasnoyarsk as a place of exile, naming two real embezzlement-scandal figures of the day; a comic blessing-and-farewell; the joke Latin signature "Homo Sachaliensis"; the household-mail instruction; and a closing apostrophe to "Trosha," almost certainly a pet name for a dog or the family cat rather than a person (compare the tenderness of address to the other proper-name greetings, which are matter-of-fact by contrast). and both give the dateline – once in the formal heading form, once folded into the salutation-line style Chekhov uses when opening directly into the letter – which is normal for his letters and not a sign of two documents; the whole item reads as a single continuous letter written at one sitting, or close to it, with the usual closing/signature/ postscript layers.
it has a full salutation-free but clearly epistolary structure, multiple paragraphs of substance, a joke signature, and a postscript, none of which the wire format permits.