To A. S. Suvorin, 24–25 November 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 24 or 25 November 1888 to Alexei Suvorin, this short letter opens with a reflection on writers and gossip, moves through an account of a story-in-progress and a wry meditation on the burdens of literary fame, touches on Feodosia and the Crimean Tatars, and closes with a note on Leikin’s vaudeville, well-wishes, the signature, and a postscript on the fate of Maslov’s play at Korsh’s theater.

2 Chekhov opens with a general warning that writers should distrust gossip and hearsay romances, citing Zola’s reliance on rumor and friends’ tales as an example of rash, careless method. He then describes a story he has begun – unnamed here – written in a "feuilleton-belletristic" form about a man who elopes with another man’s wife and offers his opinion on love, marriage, and separation at each turn, touching in passing on the theater, the cliche of "incompatibility of convictions," the Georgian Military Road, family life, the modern educated man’s unfitness for it, and the literary figures Pechorin, Onegin, and Kazbek – a "vinaigrette" so mixed, he says, that his brain is flapping its wings without knowing where to fly. Responding to a claim of Suvorin’s that writers are God’s chosen people, Chekhov demurs, noting that Shcheglov calls him a "Potemkin in literature" and that he doubts he has suffered more than shoemakers, mathematicians, or train conductors; he then offers an extended, half-rueful observation that he and Suvorin are loved not for the ordinary men they are but for the extraordinary figures others see in them (illustrating this with his sister’s irritation at being fêted merely as a writer’s sister), concluding that this is an uncomfortable position to be in and linking it back to a claim he made in his own story "A First-Class Passenger," where an engineer and a professor debate the nature of fame. He then jokes about retreating to his farmstead to escape it all, noting that Suvorin, by contrast, has Feodosia – which leads to a brief aside urging that funds spent on a German university be redirected to schools for the Crimean Tatars, whose land Chekhov says has been plundered without anyone caring for their welfare. A short note on Leikin’s comic vaudeville, closing well-wishes, and the signature follow. A postscript reports that the fate of Maslov’s play remains undecided at Korsh’s theater, illustrated by the recent staging and failure of an unnamed Spanish play, which has left the management still hesitating over the other.

3 No content requiring softening in the sensitive sense; the letter’s one notable passage of social commentary –’s remark on the "sausage-making Dorpat University, where useless Germans study," contrasted with the neglected Crimean Tatars – contains dismissive ethnic language about Baltic Germans ("useless Germans") alongside a sympathetic point about Tatar welfare; translated faithfully and without softening per the corpus’s policy of preserving Chekhov’s own phrasing rather than euphemizing it, and flagged here for any future glossary or sensitivity-index work as period ethnic-inflected commentary rather than a claim requiring further contextualization within the letter itself.