To A. P. Lensky, 26 October 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 26 October 1888, this short note is addressed directly to the actor Alexander Pavlovich Lensky of the Maly Theatre – the first letter in this corpus written TO Lensky himself, rather than merely mentioning him in the third person, as in the two preceding letters to Alexei Nikolayevich Pleshcheyev (cf. letter 497, where Lensky receives a subscriber’s copy of the Garshin memorial collection and is praised for his acting in Sumbatov’s "Chains"; and letter 3-506, where Chekhov relays Lensky’s own wish to perform the one-act play "Kalkhas" on the Maly’s smaller stage). That earlier correspondence supplied the background; this letter is the payoff – Chekhov reporting directly to Lensky that the play in question has cleared its hurdles.

2 Chekhov tells Lensky he called at his home that day and left both "Kalkhas" and a copy of it, and asks that once the censored (theatrical-censorship-approved) copy is no longer needed on stage, it be retrieved from the theatre’s director and kept safe, since it is to go on to Rassokhin – F. A. Rassokhin, who ran a well-known Moscow theatrical play-copying and distribution bureau supplying scripts to provincial theatres. Chekhov also announces, in this letter, his own final choice of title: he has settled on "The Swan Song" ("Лебединая песня") for "Kalkhas," calling the name long and bittersweet but the best he could manage after considerable thought. He apologizes for how long the play took, explaining it had to pass through "two purgatories" this time – the dramatic censorship and the Literary Committee (the same committee whose approval he had asked Pleshcheyev to help secure in letter 3-506) – and notes that but for the censorship delay, it would have reached Lensky long before.

3 The letter closes with brief personal regards to Lidia Nikolaevna, Lensky’s wife, and a wish for Lensky’s health, before a warm but conventional epistolary sign-off.