To N. A. Leikin, 20 June 1890. Shilka pod Gorbitsei.

A letter to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, the editor and publisher (of Oskolki, "Fragments," the Petersburg humor weekly where Chekhov had placed hundreds of early sketches under the pen name Antosha Chekhonte) who remained a regular correspondent and something of a literary patron in Chekhov’s early career. Written on 20 June 1890, about ten weeks into Chekhov’s overland and river journey across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, undertaken chiefly to conduct a census and survey of the convict and settler population there (the basis of Ostrov Sakhalin). The dateline is given twice – once at the head of the letter as written, and again, slightly compressed, as Chekhov restates it in section 2 – reflecting that the letter was composed in transit and picked up again as the boat neared Gorbitsa; this doubling is in the source and has been preserved rather than harmonized.

The letter covers the crossing of Lake Baikal (which he calls, following local usage, a "sea" rather than a lake, and describes for its clarity and turquoise color) and the overland leg across Transbaikalia by horse – more than 4000 versts (roughly 4300 km / 2670 miles) without incident, he reports, losing only a penknife, and dismissing tales of escaped convicts and night attacks on the road as folklore. He is now traveling by riverboat down the Shilka toward its confluence with the Amur, sitting in a first-class cabin and feeling, by contrast with the overland stretch, as if back in Europe. The letter breaks off for a boat whistle signaling arrival at Gorbitsa, with Chekhov uncertain whether he will have time to post it there or must wait for the next stanitsa, Pokrovskaya – a concrete detail of just how infrequently mail moved along the Amur (he says three times a month at best). He closes with greetings to Leikin’s wife and son and signs off, then adds what reads as an afterthought or marginal note (section 11): the beauty of the Shilka’s banks undercut by the oppressiveness of the region’s emptiness, imaged as "a cage without a bird" – a rare moment in this letter where Chekhov supplies something closer to a mood than a fact, worth flagging for readers who know him mainly as the reticent, objective narrator of the fiction.