To Avgustin Vrzal, 14 August 1891. Bogimovo.

A brief formal note of 14 August 1891 from Bogimovo, the Kaluga-province estate where the Chekhov family was summering that year, to Augustin Vrzal, a Czech translator and Slavist who had apparently written to Chekhov via the bookshop of the newspaper Novoye Vremya asking for biographical information – evidently in preparation for a Czech translation of Chekhov’s stories. This appears to be Chekhov’s first extant letter to Vrzal; the addressee is not yet present in this corpus’s entities.json. a two-line dateline (long-form and short-form with postal town), a one-word salutation, and a short autobiographical statement closing with a valediction and signature.

The letter is a compact curriculum vitae: birth in Taganrog in 1860; a grandfather who had been a serf and bought his family’s freedom before the Emancipation; a father in trade; schooling at the Taganrog gymnasium and then the medical faculty of Moscow University; the start of Chekhov’s literary career in 1879 and the story collections that resulted (Pyostrye rasskazy, V sumerkakh, Rasskazy, Khmurye lyudi); his plays; the 1888 Pushkin Prize from the Imperial Academy of Sciences; and the 1890 journey across Siberia to Sakhalin. Chekhov closes by proposing an exchange – his forthcoming Sakhalin book for Vrzal’s translation of his stories – and signs off with a period flourish, giving his name in both Cyrillic and a Germanized Latin transliteration ("Anton Pavlovitsch") evidently intended to help his Central European correspondent.