To M. P. Chekhova, 14 August 1890. Sakhalin.

A telegram, not a letter, and the editorial note "On the form" marks it as such: the printed blank of the Russian imperial telegraph office, with its fixed slots for destination and addressee, is reproduced along with the wired text itself. Chekhov sent it from Sakhalin in the second week of August 1890, six weeks into the census of the penal colony that would occupy him through the autumn and become Ostrov Sakhalin. The recipient, given only by surname in the dative on the form, is his sister Maria Pavlovna, at the Lintvaryov family’s estate near Sumy, in what is now northeastern Ukraine, where the Chekhov household was spending the summer.

The telegram’s two words are the whole of it: a name day or some other occasion gets a congratulation, and the obligatory reassurance – he is well – closes the wire before the line closes itself. Telegraph tariffs were charged by the word, and Chekhov, who economized in his fiction by instinct, economizes here by necessity; the effect is the same withholding the stories practice on purpose, now imposed from outside by the cost of the wire. There is no news of the island, no word of the work, nothing of what six weeks among convicts and settlers had shown him. Only the family formula – a greeting, a state of health – sent across the whole width of the empire to let Sumy know the journey had not yet cost him anything worse than distance.