To A. N. Kanayev, 26 March 1883. Moscow.

Written in March 1883, when Chekhov was twenty-three and still a medical student at Moscow University, supporting the family largely on what he could earn from the comic weeklies. The letter opens on the ordinary business of a young freelancer’s spring – exams, "daily bread," a debt of gratitude for favors done and errands run for his correspondent, Alexander Nikolaevich Kanaev – and then swerves, at length, into gossip about a real and consequential theatrical scandal.

The house in question is Fyodor Korsh’s private theatre, one of Moscow’s liveliest stages and a regular subject of Chekhov’s own theatrical feuilletons. In the spring of 1883 several of its leading players – Modest Pisarev, Alexandra Glama-Meshcherskaya, and Vasily Andreev-Burlak, the actors Chekhov calls "the very salt of the company" – broke with Korsh in a dispute that was, by Chekhov’s account, ultimately about money dressed up as principle. He reports the affair secondhand and admits as much, declining to adjudicate it while still delivering a sharp verdict on the Russian stage in general: what its actors lack is not talent but breeding, an "inward gentlemanliness" he and Kanaev had apparently discussed once before, at an exhibition, in lighter spirits.

That earlier conversation gives the letter its organizing idea and its one aphoristic turn – the theatre as neither beer-hall nor tavern, ruined the moment tavern manners enter it, exactly as a university is ruined once it starts to smell of the barracks. It is a claim Chekhov will keep making, in one form or another, for the rest of his writing life: that art fails not for want of gifts but for want of a certain decency in the people who make it.

The letter closes in the familiar minor key of Chekhov’s correspondence of these years – a proposed excursion to Voskresensk, a possible summer trip to Petersburg, greetings passed on to a mutual acquaintance – the large question of the theatre folded back into the small currency of plans and regards.