To M. P. Chekhov, 5 December 1890
М. П. ЧЕХОВУ, 5 декабря 1890 г. Ст. Раздельная.
Headnote
This is a telegram, not a letter — four lines total, comprising the dateline, the wire text itself, an editorial marker, and the delivery address as written on the telegram form. The message proper is a single clipped sentence with the definite-article and preposition economy typical of period telegraphic style ("Приеду Москву субботу курьерским" — literally "Will-arrive Moscow Saturday by-express"), no salutation, no closing courtesy, signed only with the bare surname "Чехов." This matches the corpus’s confirmed telegram pattern (compare): wire-economy grammar and a surname-only signature, not a transcription artifact or an abridgement.
3 – are not part of Chekhov’s wire text; they are the editorial/archival record of the telegram form itself ("На бланке:" - "On the form:") followed by the delivery address exactly as it appears on that form, addressed to the recipient at his post. The four source and are not an artifact of segmentation — nothing here suggests concatenation of separate documents.
The dateline is 5 December 1890, sent from Razdelnaya Station (a rail junction near Odessa) — a point on Chekhov’s return journey from Sakhalin Island, not a wire sent from the island itself. Chekhov left Sakhalin by sea in mid-October 1890, sailed via Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ceylon, and disembarked at Odessa in early December before completing the final leg to Moscow by rail; this telegram announces his arrival in Moscow the following Saturday (which fell on 7 December 1890) by express train. Flagging explicitly for the record: this item is NOT written from Sakhalin itself, despite date proximity to the Sakhalin journey — the dateline and the return-route geography (Razdelnaya, near Odessa) place it squarely on the homeward leg, months after Chekhov’s actual time on the island (July–October 1890).
Chekhov wires ahead to let his family know his exact arrival time in Moscow. Nothing more is said; the telegram carries only the scheduling fact.
No occurrences of any word requiring the corpus’s ethnonym or slur-handling policy in this item.