To A. A. Dolzhenko, 29 July 1891. Bogimovo.

A short, brisk letter of 29 July 1891 from Bogimovo, the Kaluga province estate where the Chekhov family was summering, to Alexei Alekseyevich Dolzhenko – a young family relation who lived with the Chekhovs in Moscow, here addressed by his familiar nickname "Alyokha" and left in charge of the Moscow apartment and his mother while the family summers in the country: dateline, short-form date, a list of brisk household instructions, two notes on money, a family greeting, a bow to an aunt, a sharp complaint over returned money, closing and signature, and a repeated envelope address block (a standard closing pattern for this corpus’s letters, not a splice).

Chekhov opens with a mock-humble list of demands: Dolzhenko is to hire some help, however decrepit, for his mother Fedosya Yakovlevna so there is someone to manage the samovar and the door; buy her olives and the occasional fried fish from Generalov’s; keep her supplied with her prescribed cough powders, one a night; and explains, with some exasperation, that a doctor should have been called at some point over the summer. He offers to lend Dolzhenko money to be repaid whenever convenient, and tells him to borrow what he needs in the meantime from Ivan or Semashko, to be settled once they arrive at Bogimovo; he also asks that radishes and cabbage be brought along. The family sends its regards and regret that Dolzhenko did not visit, and Chekhov passes on a bow to an aunt. The letter’s one sharp note follows: Chekhov rebukes Dolzhenko for scrupulously returning six roubles left over from some purchases, calling him and (presumably) his mother stingy in a cascading string of insults – misers, Plyushkins, and a further ethnic slur – before closing that such penny-counting isn’t how relatives should behave. He signs off, and the letter ends with the envelope’s Moscow return address and Dolzhenko’s name and patronymic in full, formally, in contrast to the letter’s familiar opening.