To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 15 January 1889. Moscow.

Chekhov writes this letter still catching his breath from a week of emergency surgery on "Ivanov." The play had already had its rocky Moscow premiere in 1887; now, with Alexei Suvorin’s backing and Pleshcheyev’s own approval in the theatrical-literary committee, the actor-manager Fyodorov had scheduled it for his benefit night in Petersburg, forcing Chekhov to rebuild the text under deadline – a new Sasha for Marya Savina, a nearly unrecognizable Act IV, a "polished" Ivanov. The strain shows in the letter’s violence toward his own work: the "hard labor," the wish to finish the play off with the line from Alexandre Dumas’s "Kean, or Disorder and Genius" – "Beat Ivanov, beat him with sticks!" – echoing the stage-Kean’s own cry against a hack actor. The mock-derisive nickname for the play in Section 6, "Bolvanov" (from *bolvan*, "blockhead" or "dummy"), is Chekhov’s own coinage, formed by grafting the insult onto "Ivanov"; it is preserved here as a nonce compound rather than resolved into plain English, since the joke depends on hearing "Ivanov" inside it.

Jean Shcheglov (the pen name of Ivan Leontyev) was a fellow playwright and one of Chekhov’s closest theatrical confidants, notorious among their circle for his mix of ambition and comic self-torment over the stage; Chekhov’s riff on him here – that salvaging a bad play takes more genius than writing a good one from scratch – is characteristic shop talk between two men who have both just been humiliated by the boards. The Severny Vestnik ("Northern Herald") is Pleshcheyev’s own journal, where Chekhov pointedly declines to place "Ivanov," reserving it instead for magazine publication he does not name here; "Medved" ("The Bear") is the one-act farce that, along with Suvorin’s purchase of stories for his "Cheap Library" series, is currently the only thing keeping Chekhov solvent.

The theater gossip in Sections 9-10 is Moscow, not Petersburg: Suvorin’s own play "Tanya" was running at the Maly, with Alexander Lensky as the journalist Adashev and Maria Ermolova in the title role – Chekhov’s crack about Moscow ladies taking up with journalists after seeing Lensky is aimed partly at "Davydov," a rival actor (probably Vladimir Davydov) whose more staid version of the journalist type he is needling by comparison. The "novel" in Section 10 is the long prose work Chekhov periodically announced and never finished in this form; the image of writing it as lying in new- mown hay after a good dinner is one of his most quoted accounts of what fiction, as opposed to drama, felt like to write.

"Zhorzhinka" ("little Zhorzhik") is a diminutive of Georgy/Zhorzh, almost certainly Pleshcheyev’s son; the invitation to watch "how a play ought not to be written" is Chekhov’s self-mockery continuing to the end of the letter. Rassokhin and the Garshin collection concern a small, unglossed debt – three rubles advanced against a memorial volume for Vsevolod Garshin, the writer who had died by suicide the previous year – and "Nikolai Alexeevich,sitting in his dungeon," is addressed only as a family in-joke; nothing in the letter itself identifies him further, and the reference should be treated as an open question for the apparatus rather than resolved by guesswork.