To Al. P. Chekhov, 5 June 1890. Irkutsk.

Written 5 June 1890 from Irkutsk, to Chekhov’s older brother Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov, a journalist working in Petersburg for the newspaper “New Time” (Novoye vremya). It falls roughly three weeks into Anton’s overland journey across Siberia toward Sakhalin, where he intended to survey the penal colony; he had left Moscow in the third week of April 1890 and would reach Sakhalin in early July. The letter opens and closes on a running joke between the brothers: Anton addresses Alexander as his “European brother” (since Alexander remains in European Russia) and signs off as his own “Asiatic brother,” playing on the geography of the Ural divide he had just crossed.

The letter is short and high-spirited. Anton first delivers a single practical commission – Alexander is to collect payment for Anton’s books from the New Time bookshop and forward the money in full to their sister Maria – delivered with mock severity (“on pain of disinheritance”). He then turns to travel narrative proper: the physical hardship of the journey (flooded rivers, mud, cold, hunger, sleeplessness) recast as a kind of exhilaration unavailable in Moscow; a comic ranking of Siberian towns with Irkutsk praised as the best and Tomsk dismissed outright; a complaint about the scarcity of food in the district towns, itemized by what is missing (sausage, cheese, meat, herring) versus what is always on offer (eggs, milk); and a satisfied account of resting after the ordeal of the road, including a bathhouse visit and his first real sleep. The letter closes with forward-looking travel plans (crossing Lake Baikal by steamer, then the thousand versts to the Amur, then by steamer to the Pacific, where he means to swim and eat oysters), his Sakhalin mailing address, greetings to Alexander’s household, and the brotherly sign-off.