To V. O. Kononovich, 5 January 1891. Moscow.

This is a telegram, sent from Moscow on 5 January 1891 – barely two months after Chekhov’s return from Sakhalin – to Vladimir Osipovich Kononovich, the major-general who headed the island’s penal administration during and before Chekhov’s visit. It is business, not correspondence in the personal sense: a report on a commission Chekhov had evidently taken on himself, almost certainly at Kononovich’s request, to arrange textbooks and curricular materials – "school programs and statutes" – for the island’s schools.

The practical details are brisk and specific in the way Chekhov’s working telegrams usually are. The programs and statutes are going by ordinary post; the books themselves will follow in April aboard a Volunteer Fleet steamer, the regular sea link connecting Odessa to the Far East and Sakhalin. The cost is given at roughly eight hundred rubles, with a promise to bring the figure down if he can. Chekhov signs simply "Chekhov," and adds that he is about to leave for Petersburg, from where he will send word by wire rather than letter.

Kononovich is cited respectfully in "Sakhalin Island" as one of the more capable and humane administrators Chekhov encountered there, and this telegram is a small piece of evidence for that assessment on the other side: Chekhov did not simply observe the island’s institutions and leave – he went on, from Moscow, quietly underwriting one of them. The letterhead’s own routing address, preserved here as the corpus regularly preserves such markings, gives the telegram’s destination in the terse official form of the wire itself: "Sakhalin. To the Chief of the Island."