To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 3 February 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on February 3, 1888, this letter accompanies the manuscript of "The Steppe," which Chekhov sends off to the poet and editor Alexei Pleshcheev at "Severny Vestnik" ("The Northern Herald"). Having meant to write a short piece, Chekhov found the story had grown to five signatures, and the letter is full of the mixed relief and anxiety of a writer handing over by far his longest and most ambitious work to date – he asks Pleshcheev for blunt, honest criticism rather than flattery.

2 Practical concerns run alongside the literary ones: Chekhov asks that the novella be printed whole in a single issue rather than split across numbers, requests offprints to send to the elder writers Dmitry Grigorovich and Alexander Ostrovsky, and – with self-deprecating humor about his own poverty – presses for the advance already discussed, while leaving the actual fee to the discretion of the journal’s publisher, Anna Yevreinova. The reference to "the flea in Weinberg’s anecdote" points to a comic bit associated with the writer and translator Pyotr Weinberg, used here as shorthand for Chekhov’s own impatience.

3 The letter closes with Chekhov’s characteristic self-mockery, signing himself "the debutant" and describing "The Steppe" as less a tale than an encyclopedia of the steppe – a joke that also captures the story’s real ambition to gather an entire world into its pages.