To N. A. Leikin, 10 December 1890. Moscow.

Written from Moscow on 10 December 1890, to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, editor-publisher of the Petersburg humor weekly russian"Осколки" ("Oskolki,Splinters"), for which Chekhov had written extensively in the early 1880s under the "Antosha Chekhonte" byline, and one of his most frequent correspondents of that period. This letter comes barely three weeks after Chekhov’s return to Moscow (11 December 1890, by most chronologies – the letter itself is dated the day before or the day of arrival) from his journey to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, via Siberia by land and the Indian Ocean route by sea, and is one of the first substantial personal letters he wrote recounting the trip.

The letter is a single continuous piece of correspondence, one sitting, one register throughout (warm, joking, catching an old friend up on months of news) are the doubled dateline (full form, then the abbreviated letterhead-style notation giving the Moscow street address), the same doubled-dateline convention seen elsewhere in this edition’s letter headers. opens with the enclosed "document of a red hue" – almost certainly a playful reference to some souvenir or certificate from the journey – and thanks Leikin for three letters received on Sakhalin. is the heart of the letter: a breathless catalogue of the whole round trip – the overland crossing of Siberia, the voyage down the Amur, the Tatar Strait, three months and three days on Sakhalin taking the census that was the official purpose of the trip, the return route touching Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, and Port Said while skirting a cholera outbreak in Japan – capped by the comic set-piece of the two mongooses he brought back from Ceylon, described with the same mock-zoological relish as the rest of the passage. notes a chill caught in the Archipelago (the Malay Archipelago, on the sea passage) that has left him coughing and feverish. are catching-up chat: news of Leikin’s affairs, a request for details about an unspecified matter involving reviewers, a greeting to Leikin’s colleague Bilibin, a description of the new Moscow lodgings on Malaya Dmitrovka with "dullness" personified as already looking in the window, a wry aside about a dose of castor oil, the shock of Moscow frost after the tropics, and regards to Leikin’s wife and son with a request for his latest book. are the closing benediction – playing on the literal gray winter sky over Petersburg versus the heaven "where the holy saints dwell" – and the signature.