To M. P. Chekhova, 5 July 1891. Bogimovo.

A short comic letter of 5 July 1891, from Bogimovo (the Kaluga province estate where Chekhov summered that year), to his sister Maria Pavlovna ("Masha"), who was evidently away and expected back. The letter is pure household farce in the running family-joking register: exaggerated complaints of domestic collapse in her absence (nothing to eat, flies, foul plumbing, the pet mongoose raiding the jam), a comic roll call of the summer colony’s characters and their private absurdities, and mock- urgent instructions and greetings.

Chekhov invents a nonsense name for the rail line in (Ryazhsk-Bryazhsk), a comic rhyming garble rather than a real station name, kept as invented nonsense in translation. closes with a joke about "socialists" plotting Ukrainian separatism, delivered in a scrap of mock-Ukrainian-accented Russian ("Украина их нэ забудэ"); rendered here in plain English as the joke does not depend on the accent surviving translation.