To I. P. Chekhov, 30 August 1890. Sakhalin.

A telegram, again reproduced with its printed form ("On the form" marks the imperial telegraph blank, as in the sibling wires of this period), sent from Sakhalin on 30 August 1890 to Chekhov’s brother Ivan Pavlovich Chekhov, a schoolteacher, care of the Lintvaryov estate near Sumy where the family was summering. Unlike the bare health-and-greeting telegrams to Maria Pavlovna in the same weeks, this one is working correspondence: three months into the Sakhalin census, Chekhov is relaying detailed instructions about the island’s zemstvo (local self-government) schools – their curriculum, textbook lists and methodology, the administrative structure and composition of the school councils – material that belongs to the same survey of the colony’s institutions that would become Ostrov Sakhalin. He asks Ivan, as the family’s schoolman, to have Malyshev forward this material to General Kononovich, the island’s chief administrator, and separately instructs that Suvorin arrange to ship textbooks C.O.D. – standard texts for the senior division (150 pupils) and the junior (300). The telegram closes with the same formula as the others of the season: a departure date (September) and the reassurance that he is well, signed Chekhov.