To the Chekhovs, 1891. Vienna.

Written from Vienna on 20 March (1 April, New Style) 1891 – Chekhov’s first letter home after crossing the border, and the opening dispatch of the famous 1891 European travel series undertaken with his publisher and patron Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin and Suvorin’s son Alexei Alexeyevich. He had arrived the previous afternoon after the long rail journey from Warsaw.

The letter is pure holiday high spirits: comic mock-address to "my dear Czechs" (a pun on "Chekhov"/"chekhi") and, absurdly, "my dear Tungus"; an enraptured, itemized inventory of Vienna’s streets, shops, churches (St. Stephen’s, the Votiv-Kirche), and architecture generally, which he declares – half in earnest – the first time he has truly understood architecture as an art; a satirical note on the Russian émigré and anonymous literature for sale in shop windows, pointedly not his own or his friends’; a biblical-parody flourish ("Understand, ye peoples...") introducing a complaint about Viennese cabs; grumbling, in German transliterated in the source, about being charged per bread roll at dinner; and homesickness undercutting the bravado. He closes with family errands (a devotional print of St. Varlaam to be fetched and set on his desk), a stray planning note about the rest of the itinerary (Spain now unlikely, Bukhara apparently still on), business queries about a Griboyedov-committee colleague and a city-council seat, and closing greetings including one to the painter Isaac Levitan. A postscript notes that his grizzled fur cap has strangers abroad mistaking him for a wealthy Russian count, and he reports on his brother Alexander’s two sons. The envelope, addressed to his sister Maria in Moscow, is transcribed in full.