To A. S. Suvorin, 4 January 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 4 January 1889, the day after the hurried note translated as and continuing the same immediate correspondence thread as the companion letter to Davydov of the same date. This is a longer, more expansive letter to Alexei Suvorin, opening with more play-revision business for the Petersburg "Ivanov" and then turning into one of Chekhov’s characteristic mixed letters – part practical errand, part bantering essay, part a vivid private daydream about opening night.

2 After the double dateline (1-2), Chekhov sends Suvorin two insertions and one correction to be passed along to the actor Fyodorov(-Yurkovsky), with a joking threat to publish the letter itself if his play runs long, to fix the blame on Suvorin (3). He asks for Fyodorov-Yurkovsky’s name and patronymic so he can write to him directly, explains he still lacks a working copy of the play (missing Act IV, most of Act II, and part of Act III), and says he will send the censor’s copy around the 10th-15th once further revisions are in (4). He asks that the playbills specify the author not be called out until the play’s end, joking that the fourth act will "be the death of it" (5). A long digressive passage follows in which Chekhov teases Suvorin about being urged toward politics, arguing – with examples of Suvorin’s own recent theatrical and literary work – that Suvorin is much better suited to "the arts" now that he is established and prosperous, and voicing a mock preference for Persia to fall to the English rather than to reclaim it from them (6). He reflects, more seriously, that the theater’s appeal lies in its resemblance to sport – the thrill of success or failure – rather than to life as such, as Suvorin had apparently suggested (7). The letter’s centerpiece is an extended, vividly imagined daydream of his own opening night: Anna Ivanovna’s irony, friends’ anxious faces, the audience’s imagined hostility or coldness, Grigorovich’s shout of "Author!," his own exhaustion afterward, and the gossip he expects to hear about the actors’ performances – ending with Anna Ivanovna’s imagined complaint (8-9) and Chekhov’s own imagined response of simply going to bed (10). He closes with good wishes, regards, and a note that "Tatyana Repina" is now expected to open on the 19th rather than the 16th of January (11), and signs off (12).