To A. S. Suvorin, 28 November 1888. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 28 ноября 1888 г. Москва.
Headnote
1 Written from Moscow on 28 November 1888 to Alexei Suvorin, this short letter is chiefly a working memo on a story-in-progress – vetoing a proposed title, sketching the story’s subject and method at length, and closing with a replacement title suggestion – interspersed with brief theater gossip, a dig at a rival playwright’s outsized staging demands, and a bit of domestic banter.
2 The letter opens with dateline and compressed re-dating (1-2), then Chekhov rejects the title "Happy Thoughts" for the story he is writing, on the grounds that readers expect a certain (Bernard-style) kind of aphoristic content under that title and that small newspapers have already used it (3). is the letter’s longest section: he will finish the story at Suvorin’s, hopes it will suit "Novoye Vremya," and describes being besieged by visitors in Moscow; he then gives an extended account of the story’s method – deliberately training himself to write "disquisitions" in narrative rather than conversational form as practice before attempting a novel – and its plot, a first-person doctor-narrator who treats a young married woman, befriends her husband (an ordinary, convictionless man forced by his situation into unanswerable questions about how to live), and receives from him an "autobiographical sketch" from which the narrator excerpts chapters, beginning at chapter VII, to make the point that a thinking life without a settled world-view is unbearable. is a one-line self-deprecating aside that the result reads more like a feuilleton than a story. is a brief, dismissive remark about the director of the Moscow theaters lying about actresses. contrasts the modest staging needs of the Spanish playwright Echegaray with the extravagant demands of Maslov’s play, and adds a sardonic aside about a Korsh-company actor’s inflated view of his own suitability for a Don Juan role. closes with regards and a joking aside about Suvorin’s stationery and Chekhov’s own hypothetical future wealth, then signature (9) and a one-line postscript proposing "Without a Title" as the story’s new name (10).