To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 20 October 1888. Moscow.
А. Н. ПЛЕЩЕЕВУ, 20 октября 1888 г. Москва.
Headnote
1 Translator’s note on the date: the source header dates this letter 20 October 1888, but the letter’s own opening line, in Chekhov’s habitual shorthand, reads "10 окт." ("10th Oct."). The two dates are not reconciled here; both are preserved as given in the source rather than silently resolved, so that a reader consulting the standard edition can judge for themselves which (if either) is the copyist’s or editor’s error. (For comparison, the companion letter of 4 October, letter 490, uses the same two-line convention – a full dateline followed by a short "4 окт." – and there the two agree.)
2 This short, miscellany-style note to the poet and "Severny Vestnik" editor Alexei Nikolaevich Pleshcheev opens with household news: Georges Lintvarev – a member of the Lintvarev family at whose Luka estate the Chekhovs had spent recent summers, and who appears by first name alone in the immediately preceding letter (490), where Chekhov tells Pleshcheev "you’ll soon see Georges; he’s off to Petersburg" – has now arrived in Moscow and is playing the Chekhovs’ piano before his onward trip to Petersburg. "Jean Shcheglov" is Chekhov’s playful French-styled nickname for his friend the writer Ivan Leontievich Leontiev, who published under the pen name "Shcheglov" and appears frequently elsewhere in the correspondence under that name.
3 Chekhov then turns to business: he asks Pleshcheev to have the proof of his story forwarded so he can make small corrections and cuts (he promises to add nothing), and, half in earnest, presses for his fee, joking that he is "wasting away" waiting for it – an echo of the money worries that run through the whole autumn 1888 sequence of letters to Pleshcheev (cf. letters 483, 488, 490).
4 The letter’s most consequential line is its briefest: "I’ve been coughing blood." This is one of the earliest documented instances of what would prove to be the tuberculosis that eventually killed Chekhov, though at this date – as in the earlier episodes recorded in letters 97 (December 1884) and 123/165 (1885-86) – he treats it as a passing, probably minor symptom rather than a diagnosed illness; formal diagnosis of consumption was still years off.