To the Chekhovs, 7 June 1890. Irkutsk.

This is a telegram, not a letter – one of the shortest items in the correspondence, and structurally identical to the later Vologdin wire: a clipped, elliptical body with the prepositions and connective grammar stripped out ("Сделайте складчину. Телеграфируйте подробнее Иркутск Амурское подворие. Скучаю. Здоров." – "Club together. Wire more detail Irkutsk Amur Inn. Miss you. Well."), no salutation, no signature. That terseness is genuine telegraphic economy – wire rates were charged by the word – not literary compression or a transcription gap.

Section 3, "На бланке:" ("On the form:"), is the standard-edition editors’ own annotation, not part of Chekhov’s wording. It signals that what follows in section 4 – "Сумы. Чеховой." ("Sumy. To Chekhova.") – is the address block written on the printed telegram blank itself (destination town, then addressee in the dative), distinct from the message body above it. This two-part layout (body, then a separately labeled form/address portion) is the same convention used across the corpus’s telegram items; it is not a sign of concatenated or spliced source material. The word "складчину" ("club together," i.e. pool money) recurs in the very next item in the source sequence (a full letter of the same date/leg of the trip), confirming this wire and that letter belong to the same continuous run of correspondence and are not editorially misfiled.

Dated 7 June 1890, Irkutsk – Chekhov is roughly six weeks into his overland journey across Siberia toward Sakhalin, and this is a brief check-in wired to family in Sumy (in the Kharkov province of present-day Ukraine), where his mother, sister, and other relatives were summering. "Чеховой" (dative of "Чехова") addresses a female Chekhov – almost certainly his mother, Yevgenia Yakovlevna Chekhova, the natural addressee for a family telegram of this kind, though the wire itself names only the surname and gives no first name or patronymic to confirm which Chekhova. The message asks the family to pool money (probably in response to a funds request tied to the expenses of the journey, picked up again in the fuller letter that follows), asks them to wire back a fuller reply care of the Amur Inn (Амурское подворье) in Irkutsk – an actual hostelry there, and elsewhere in Chekhov’s Siberian letters his mailing address for that leg – and closes with two flat status words: he misses them, and he is well.