To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 11 February 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 11 February 1889, on the eve of Alexei Pleshcheyev’s name-day (Alexei’s day fell on the 12th), this short letter to the poet and editor is a mix of holiday regret, shop talk, and gossip. Chekhov apologizes for being unable to attend the name-day celebration in Petersburg and describes Moscow, by contrast, as a flat, wintry comedown from the "strong sensations" of his recent stay there – an echo of the same Petersburg trip he discusses in the companion letter of the same date to N. M. Lintvareva.

2 The letter’s practical business is the pricing of an unnamed play Chekhov is preparing – almost certainly "The Wood Demon" (Leshy), which he was drafting that winter – for which he asks Pleshcheyev’s advice on a fair per-signature rate, noting that he has never before had a play published and so does not know the market.

3 The middle of the letter recounts a visit from the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, with a substantial aside on a debate the two men had over Lev Tikhomirov’s 1888 recantation pamphlet "Why I Ceased to Be a Socialist" (Tikhomirov was a former Narodnaya Volya terrorist who had petitioned the tsar for pardon); Chekhov’s position – that there is no sin or crime without evil will, whatever the outcome of a sincerely held conviction – is offered as a point on which the two men agreed to disagree, with Chekhov’s affectionate but backhanded assessment of Ostrovsky’s mind ("loose, still, like pond water – placid, but for all that large") closing the exchange.

4 "Zhorzhik" in of the translation is almost certainly Pleshcheyev’s son Georgy ("Zhorzh"), the same figure Chekhov calls "Zhorzhinka" in his letter to Pleshcheyev of 15 January 1889; "Luka" is the Lintvarev family estate near Sumy where Chekhov summered and where he was already angling to take a house that season, per the Lintvareva letter of the same date. The reference to Anatoly Koni’s published court speeches and the case "of the midwife Kolosov and the nobleman Yaroshevich" is a piece of shop talk: Chekhov, ever alert to newspaper and courtroom material for fiction, recommends the case as raw material for a novel about "patented sons of bitches." The "winning ticket in the second loan" refers to a state lottery bond (the Second Internal Loan with Winnings, one of two such Russian government lottery-bond issues then in circulation); Chekhov’s remark that he "will win" on the first of March, the date of that issue’s next drawing, is dryly ironic self-mockery about his own prospects rather than a real financial claim.