To A. M. Yevreinova, 10 March 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 10 March 1889 to Anna Mikhailovna Yevreinova, editor of "Severny Vestnik" ("The Northern Herald"), already established elsewhere in this corpus as the journal’s editor and the recipient of Chekhov’s running "Ivanov" proof-sheet complaints. This letter mixes business, literary confidences, and comic banter in Chekhov’s characteristic register with an editor-correspondent he can needle affectionately.

2 After the double dateline (1-2) and salutation (3), Chekhov opens with a small accounting matter: he has received his honorarium and worries Yevreinova failed to deduct a debt he owes the journal’s office (4). He then turns to his novel-in-progress, distinguishing it from a story he has just finished for other purposes, and describes with comic relish the material that will draw the censor’s red pencil – characters who declare unbelief in God, a father whose son is sentenced to unlimited penal servitude for armed resistance, a police captain ashamed of his own uniform, and a widely hated marshal of nobility (5). He reflects on having enough money to write freely until autumn and being bound by no commitments, though he half-expects his own enthusiasm for the novel to lapse within weeks (6), and offers Yevreinova a shorter story for the May or June issue while asking for patience with the novel if she can wait until July or August (7).

3 He appeals to her, half in earnest, to shed self-censorship as an editor, professing his own wary dislike of censorship in principle even though it has cut little of his own work so far, and drawing a line between the press (which should be free even "in Turkey") and the theater, which he allows is a different case (8). This tips into an extended comic fantasy: buying up and shuttering every rival "thick journal" to leave only "Severny Vestnik" standing, kitted out with electric lighting, a grand doorman, its own printing house, rubber-tired editorial carriages, a foreign-affairs contributor poached from the explorer/adventurer circle around the Ashinov affair, and forty thousand subscribers – capped by a joke about a "rich bride" he has never seen and a mock love-letter line, "Love not me, but the idea" (9). He then returns abruptly to real business: impatience for the "Ivanov" proof-sheets and a joking threat to send his "seconds" (i.e., duel witnesses) after the printer Demakov over the delay (10), and reports he means to stay in Moscow through May in an unbroken writing fit (11). The letter closes with regards to two named acquaintances (12), family greetings and good wishes (13), a sign-off (14) and signature (15), followed by a postscript-like final item recommending Yevreinova run a story by Gilyarovsky about log rafts while it is topical (16).