To N. A. Nikulina, 22 December 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 22 December 1888, 8 o’clock in the evening, to Nadezhda Alexeyevna Nikulina (1845-1923), a leading comic and character actress of the Maly Theatre in Moscow. This is the first letter in the corpus addressed directly to Nikulina herself – but not the first contact between them: the three preceding letters to A. S. Suvorin (, 17 Dec.;, 18 Dec.;, 19 Dec.) already describe Chekhov visiting Nikulina at her home, receiving notes and a carriage from her, and negotiating casting with her in person, all in the days immediately before this letter. Read together, the sequence shows an established, ongoing dealings between them by 22 December; this letter is simply the first of those dealings to survive as a letter addressed to her.

2 The business at hand is the play "Ivanov," then in preparation for a Maly Theatre benefit production. Chekhov apologizes for a delay (through no real fault of his, "guilty without meaning to be") in getting her the script, which reached him only that evening; he encloses it, noting one copy is the version cleared by the censor. He relays a request from A. S. Suvorin (publisher of "Novoye Vremya" and Chekhov’s close correspondent/patron in this period) that the actor Fyodor Gorev be cast as Sabinin, a character in "Ivanov." He clarifies that the copies now being sent are the definitive latest text, superseding an earlier copy he had already given her, and extends blanket permission for the cast to cut or alter the play freely except for a few passages he specifies in his (separate) letter to Suvorin – asking only that Nikulina tell him what hours she can be reached at home, presumably so he can follow up in person.