To A. S. Suvorin, 26 December 1888. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 26 December 1888 to Alexei Suvorin, this is a shorter, quieter letter than the long theatrical dispatches surrounding it, moving in short bursts between wounded feelings over a rejected story, a candid confession of low spirits, brief business notes on "Ivanov" and "Tatyana Repina," literary encouragement for Suvorin’s own writing, and a closing return to the Petersburg theater news. It reads as a direct continuation of several threads already running through the immediately preceding letters to Suvorin.

2 The letter opens with Chekhov defending, at some length, his refusal to give Suvorin’s paper "Novoye Vremya" a story he considers substandard, insisting he will hold to the same policy in future and that "Novoye Vremya" – unlike the "Petersburg Gazette," which "will swallow anything" – deserves better (3). He then answers, point by point and with unusual candor, Suvorin’s apparent charge that it is too soon for him to be complaining about his standing with the public and the critics: he does not feel satisfaction in his own work, cannot trust the public’s sincerity, and if his tone read as a complaint, it was on behalf of "our whole guild" rather than himself alone (4). This leads into a rare direct confession of a bad week – hemorrhoids, visitors, the poet Palmin’s head injury (a thread carried over from, where the same accident is reported as having just happened), a patient who died in front of him, and a self-aware irritation at burdening Suvorin with his "melancholy" (5), a note he returns to and apologizes for again shortly after (12).

3 Business items follow in quick succession: promises of a New Year’s fairy tale and, soon after, "The Princess" ("Княгиня") – both already promised in and repeated here as still pending (6); a one-line note that vaudevilles can only be printed in summer (7); and the letter’s fullest passage (8), responding to Suvorin’s wish that Chekhov "let Sasha go free" in "Ivanov" – Chekhov demurs, noting the play may not even be staged, then uses the request as a launching point for a blunt, generalizing statement on men and women ("both... two of a kind, a pair of five-kopeck pieces – only the man is the shrewder and more just") before returning to same-day plans to discuss "Tatyana [Repina]" with the actor Lensky. A one-line update on "my painter fellow" – the unresolved passport/conscription predicament detailed at length in – reports no change (9), followed by a short, serious note that he means to move to Petersburg that autumn with his mother and sister "to get down to business in earnest" (10).

4 Chekhov then turns to encourage Suvorin’s own fiction, praising his piece and his pseudonymous "N. Lavretsky" stories, with a memorable image contrasting deliberately rough, "heaped and jumbled" prose with fiction that is merely "licked smooth" (11). Practical notes on "Tatyana Repina" follow: releasing the play for provincial theaters through the agent Rassokhin, and a request that Suvorin’s monologue for the actor Davydov be lithographed rather than printed, since actors are unused to reading print copy, and published under the "N. Lavretsky" pseudonym (15). The letter closes with Petersburg theater news carried from Lensky’s visit – Yermolova has taken up the role of "Tatyana" with pleasure, the first act may go worse than in Petersburg but the rest better (14) – a report that rehearsals will begin after the holidays and that the casting has settled itself without needing Chekhov’s intervention after all (16), and a joking report that the actors and their wives explain Chekhov’s frequent Petersburg trips by inventing a rumor that he means to marry Suvorin’s grown daughter (16), before closing regards and signature (17-19).