To A. S. Suvorin, 7 January 1889. Moscow.

1 A long, wide-ranging letter of 7 January 1889 from Moscow to Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, written the same day as a much shorter business note to Suvorin about play "variants" and continuing the run of "Ivanov" casting correspondence from early January. It opens with routine business – a Literary Fund membership form to sign and return – then moves through an extended, candid discussion of the play’s Moscow casting, a request for a name still unanswered from an earlier letter, a striking passage of authorial self-analysis prompted by "Ivanov," and closes with a vivid autobiographical sketch and a small domestic anecdote.

2 After the double dateline (1-2), Chekhov asks Suvorin to sign and return a form confirming his membership in a benevolent Society, with a dry joke about the term of membership running 50 years past one’s own death for a mere 15 roubles (3). He turns to the Moscow "Ivanov," reporting that he sent two variant passages that day and lamenting that the actor playing the title role, Davydov, is too inflexible for the part, forcing him to write "shorter and greyer"; he is equally troubled that Maria Savina will be wasted playing a lifeless Sasha opposite a mumbling Ivanov, and jokes that if he had known the casting in advance he would have built the whole play around Sasha instead (4). He details the two big monologues the role demands – one to be "sung," one read "with ferocity" – and predicts Davydov will deliver both "intelligently," meaning lifelessly (5), then asks again for the name and patronymic of the actor Fyodorov, a request he had already made in an earlier letter (6). Chekhov then shifts register entirely: he muses on the paper he would like to give at the Literary Society confessing his ambition to sum up and put an end to the Russian literary vogue for despondent heroes with "Ivanov," concedes the design was sound but the execution poor, and credits his refusal to heed Grigorovich’s advice to write a novel with sparing him worse damage, before reflecting on what talent and material lack without maturity and a hard-won sense of personal freedom (7). This leads into an extended, unsparing autobiographical passage about what young men of non-noble birth pay in youth for what the gentry receive free from nature, cataloguing a battery of childhood humiliations and ending on the image of such a young man squeezing the slave out of himself drop by drop until he wakes one morning with real human blood in his veins rather than a slave’s (8). The letter closes on a lighter note with a small anecdote about the miserly poet Palmin, whom Chekhov had treated for a head injury and who brought him a touchingly generous gift of perfume in return (9), then signs off apologizing for the letter’s length (10-11).