To G. M. Chekhov, 29 December 1890. Moscow.
Г. М. ЧЕХОВУ, 29 декабря 1890 г. Москва.
Headnote
1 Written from Moscow on 29 December 1890 to Georgy Mitrofanovich Chekhov ("Zhorzh"), Anton’s cousin in Taganrog, son of his uncle Mitrofan Yegorovich Chekhov. This is Chekhov’s first letter to Georgy since his return from the Sakhalin expedition – he had reached Odessa by sea and then Moscow by rail in early December – and it gives his Taganrog family the belated, condensed version of the trip he had already begun recounting at length to Suvorin (compare, written three weeks earlier and far more expansive).
2 He opens apologizing for the delay in answering letters from Georgy and from Georgy’s father, blaming the constant stream of visitors since his return – a comic complaint that he now understands what his uncle Mitrofan Yegorovich puts up with in the shop, where any talkative monk or "great man" wanting an audience interrupts him the moment he tries to write or read.
3 He reports himself alive, well, and financially unscathed by the trip (he had feared debt), and notes with some pride that across eight months of hardship he was never ill and lost nothing but a penknife – a plainer, more domestic register than the harsher retrospective verdict ("hellish") he gave Suvorin about Sakhalin itself.
4 A compressed travel summary: the 4500-verst overland crossing of Siberia by horse, three months and three days on Sakhalin, the sea passage home by Volunteer Fleet steamer through Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon, Mount Sinai, Port Said, the Greek Archipelago, and Constantinople, closing with a joke that the Greeks of the Archipelago – exporters of olives and Santorini wine – are held to be great swindlers and ignoramuses everywhere except Taganrog (a wink at Taganrog’s substantial Greek merchant community, playing to a correspondent who would get the joke). He adds that he is immune to seasickness even in heavy weather.
5 Family and social notes: praise (via his brother Misha) for Georgy and for "Volodya," with a joking aside about Volodya’s height being inconvenient for a future metropolitan needing his mitre fitted by shorter deacons; a plan to ask P. I. Tchaikovsky, now (Chekhov jokes) Russia’s second-ranked celebrity after Lev Tolstoy – with Chekhov placing himself, self-deprecatingly, at No. 877 – whether the composer had called on the Chekhovs’ Taganrog house; and a complaint about a cask of Santorini wine sent as a gift by "Father Korf," which he says he can no longer stomach.
6 Closing: a request for a longer letter in return, a promise to visit Taganrog in spring or summer, extensive greetings to the uncle, aunt, the seminary, "both girls," and "Irinushka" (household/family members not further identified in this letter), and the family’s return greetings before the signature.
9 the source is a single continuous letter – one formal dateline (section 1) followed by Chekhov’s own brief informal dateline (section 2, a doubling pattern already documented elsewhere in this correspondence, e.g.), then an unbroken sequence of paragraphs on a single occasion, closing greetings, a family postscript-style regard, and a signature.