To M. V. Kiseleva, 29 September 1886. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow to Maria Kiseleva, a family friend and amateur writer whose estate at Babkino the Chekhovs summered near. Chekhov, acting as her informal literary agent and mentor, responds to a story of hers ("Galoshes," published under the pseudonym "Pince-nez") and lays out five half-joking, half-earnest rules for writing successfully for the "minor press": write constantly, write on any subject, avoid plagiarizing foreign originals too obviously, write in a single sitting, and keep it short. He closes with theater gossip, then turns abruptly serious: his brother Nikolai, staying with him, is gravely ill with a gastric hemorrhage, prompting a bleak reflection on death and squalor before a terse final note that money is short.

2 The letter is one of Chekhov’s most quoted statements of his own craft discipline and his ambivalent relationship to hack journalism, and it captures the tonal whiplash characteristic of his correspondence — comic bravado giving way, within a paragraph, to real anguish over his brother’s health (Nikolai would die of tuberculosis less than two years later).