To the Chekhovs, 31 May 1890. Kansk.

1 Written on 31 May 1890 from Kansk, a town on the Trakt (post road) in central Siberia, this brief note to his sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhova belongs to the string of dispatches Chekhov sent home during his overland journey across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, which he had left Moscow to survey in April 1890. At this point he is still roughly 800 versts (about 850 km) short of Irkutsk, traveling by horse-drawn conveyance over roads that alternate between mud and ruts.

2 The letter is a short, wry travel note rather than a developed narrative: a play on the near-identical names of Kansk and Kainsk (two Siberian towns Chekhov jokes could be combined into one middling town, "Zvenigorod," a stock name for a nondescript provincial place), a report that borshch is about to be served, a note that a fellow traveler (an army officer) has a toothache, a vivid catalogue of the physical grime and exhaustion of the road (dust in his clothes, his trunk, his mouth), and a closing reassurance that he is alive, well, and that a brandy bottle given to him by Sofia Kuvshinnikova has survived the journey intact. It closes with the address panel from the reverse of the card, reproduced here as separate sections, addressed to Maria at the family’s summer address in Sumy, Kharkov province.