To P. Ye. Chekhov, 28 June 1890. Radde.

This is a telegram, not a letter, and the editors of the Soviet thirty-volume edition have preserved it as such: four bare lines, the last two reproducing the address written on the form itself. Chekhov sent it from Radde, a Cossack stanitsa on the Amur, partway through the overland and river crossing of Siberia that he had begun in April 1890 and that would end, by July, on Sakhalin Island, where he spent three months conducting a one-man census of the penal colony. The recipient, Pavel Yegorovich Chekhov, was his father; the destination on the form, Sumy, was the Ukrainian town near which the Chekhov and Lintvaryov families had taken a dacha that summer – Pavel Yegorovich was there with the rest of the family while Anton crossed Asia alone.

The date matters: 28 June falls on the eve of Peter’s Day (29 June, old style), the feast of SS. Peter and Paul, and so the name day of Pavel Yegorovich (Pavel/Paul). "Congratulations" is the conventional greeting for a name day, sent the one way available to a son four thousand miles off in the Amur basin – by telegraph relayed onward to a provincial post office, then to the dacha. The instruction that follows, "Telegraph, Nikolaevsk, in detail," is itself addressed to the family: wire him back, in full, care of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, the next point on his route where mail could reach him.

There is nothing here to interpret for tone or irony – a telegram by its nature has no room for either, and Chekhov, who elsewhere could spin a single paragraph into a comic monologue, here writes in the clipped, fee-counted diction of the wire itself: no articles, no connectives, each word a separate charge. That very compression is the document’s interest. It catches the journey at its most logistically exposed – thousands of versts from family, dependent on river steamers and relay stations, marking a holiday observance he cannot attend and asking, in the same four words, both for a small comfort and for real information. The closing word, "missing you" (or, as the Russian also permits, "homesick"), is the one unguarded note Chekhov allows himself in a message that otherwise reads as pure errand.

Scholarly apparatus aside, the piece earns its place in the corpus precisely because it is not literary: a working telegram from the middle of the Sakhalin journey, useful to anyone tracing Chekhov’s route day by day, and a small counterweight to the comic sketches and the finished stories – proof of the plain, practical hand behind them.