To A. S. Lazarev, 4 February 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on February 4, 1888, this letter goes to the writer Alexander Lazarev, who published under the pen name A. Gruzinsky. Chekhov reports, with visible pride and exhaustion, that he has just finished and sent off his novella "The Steppe" to the journal "Severny Vestnik" – the work that would mark his breakthrough into serious literature. He does the arithmetic on his fee (200 rubles per printer’s sheet, times five sheets) and jokes about what it takes to earn a thousand rubles in a month.

2 The letter’s center is Chekhov’s half-joking, half-serious reflection on his own literary crisis: he describes "The Steppe" as his masterpiece, written at the cost of real strain, and brushes aside Lazarev’s evident attempt to console him against the possibility of failure. Contrasting Lazarev’s youth ("your future is still ahead of you") with his own sense of being at a turning point, Chekhov turns Lazarev’s consoling word "sometimes" into a running joke, promising to use it just as emptily on Lazarev’s own death and future failures. He closes with wary talk of the silence from his editors Nikolai Leikin and Viktor Bilibin at "Oskolki," which he reads as more ominous than any open complaint would be.