To the Chekhovs, 1 July 1890. Nikolayevsk.

one continuous item to Chekhov’s sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhova, written aboard a river steamer on the Amur approaching Nikolayevsk-on-Amur (Николаевск, now Nikolayevsk-on-Amur), during the final river leg of the journey to Sakhalin. This is *before* Chekhov’s arrival on Sakhalin itself (which followed on 11 July 1890, roughly ten days later); Nikolayevsk was the mouth-of-the-Amur port from which he would cross by sea to the island. The item is short but structurally whole: dateline (1), a note explaining an illustration/inscription made by his travelling companion (2), the letter body (3), a French sign-off (4), a one-line postscript about his brother Ivan’s address (5), and the envelope’s verso address, given as its own three-part block (6 "On the reverse:", the town/province, the addressee’s name) – this is the address panel of the physical letter/postcard, reproduced by the source as trailing sections rather than folded into, and is not evidence of a second spliced document.

Content: Chekhov reports that, judging by newspapers he read in Khabarovka (two to two-and-a-half months old by the time he saw them), this letter itself will not reach Moscow until around October, given how slow the upstream mail is. He notes he has now been on the river ten days, is tired of the trip and eager to reach a landing, complains of the heat by day and closeness by night, and observes that past Khabarovka the Amur widens beyond the Volga and the boat rocks. He then asks a run of quick questions about home – whether family friends visited the Lintvaryov estate at Luka, whether "Zhame" was there, whether Ivanenko came often – gives a small domestic instruction (take the piano back in Moscow), and sends regards to all. The sign-off is in French. The postscript asks that his brother Ivan send his Moscow address. The final three sections reproduce the outer address of the letter/postcard itself.

Dateline note: is normalized to the corpus’s pinned ‘D Month YYYY. City.‘ convention ("1 July 1890. Nikolayevsk."). an "On the reverse:" heading followed by the destination town/province and the addressee’s name, matching the physical layout of the original letter/postcard.