To L. S. Mizinova, 11 January 1891. Petersburg.

Written from Petersburg on 11 January 1891 to Lidia (Lika) Stakhiyevna Mizinova, a close friend of the Chekhov family and, in these years, the object of a long, unresolved flirtation with Chekhov himself – a relationship he consistently kept at the pitch of teasing banter rather than declared feeling, as this letter shows. He calls her "Duma clerk" (she worked as a clerk for the Moscow city assessment office) and "Likisha," an affectionate diminutive of her nickname Lika.

The letter is a single short, unbroken comic performance in the register Chekhov reserved for Mizinova: mock outrage, extravagant curses wished on her in play, and a running joke about her wanting to flee to the Aleutian Islands (matched against a lady acquaintance of his brother Misha’s who talks of decamping to Australia). The coughing he scolds her for, and the remedies he prescribes (Obersalzbrunnen mineral water, Dover’s powder), read as concern folded into the joke rather than a real medical episode. "Trofim (Trophim)," invoked twice as her prospective husband whom misfortune will befall, is a running comic figure rather than a named real suitor; "Bartsal, or Bucephalus" plays the same game, garbling a name (probably itinerant amusement – a reference too slight to pin down further) into the name of Alexander the Great’s horse for the joke’s sake. "Mamunya" in the closing NB is unidentified beyond the name. Chekhov signs himself "The Well-Known Writer," his usual self-mocking epithet with Mizinova.