To I. L. Leontyev, 11 March 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 11 March 1889 to Ivan Leontyevich Leontyev, who wrote under the pen name Shcheglov and whom Chekhov addresses throughout, as elsewhere in the corpus, by the affectionate nickname "Jean." The letter is a short, bantering catch-up after a silence on Chekhov’s side, mixing a mock-serious denial of rumors, a comic grievance against a fellow journalist, brisk literary business, work on his novel, a joke about his hoarded library, an irritated aside about gossip circulating in Petersburg, ribbing about Shcheglov’s domestic habits, and a closing note on the weather and his health.

2 After the double dateline (1-2), Chekhov opens by dismissing rumors that he is ill, has left town, or is about to marry for money, telling Jean to reassure "the idealist Leman" on that last point, and blaming his long silence on plain laziness (3). He then defends himself against an implied slight: the journalist Pastukhov had apparently had a letter to Shcheglov signed off in a clerk’s hand rather than his own, which Chekhov treats as presumptuous given how little he actually has to do with Pastukhov or his paper, the "Moskovsky Listok," despite the paper and its proprietor being counted among his literary enemies – though Chekhov notes drily that Pastukhov pays well (4).

3 Turning to business, Chekhov answers a query about his one-act farce "The Proposal": the actor V. N. Davydov had spoken of staging it at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, and Chekhov tells Shcheglov to check with Davydov directly and, if nothing comes of it, to do as he likes with the play (5). He reports slow, exploratory progress on his long-gestating novel (6), and jokes that he has packed away and hidden Shcheglov’s books to keep them from being pilfered by light-fingered readers, with a passing fantasy of a proper library on a future country property (7). He then voices real irritation at gossip about him circulating in Petersburg, drawing a line between contempt for gossips (which costs him nothing) and the risk that he might actually lose his temper over it (8). The letter closes with a joke urging Shcheglov’s wife to drive him out of Petersburg for the summer before prolonged, sedentary bachelor-style living turns him into a caricatured old "captain" (9), a wry account of the Moscow weather and his own flaring hemorrhoids (10), and the signature "Your Antoine" (11), one of Chekhov’s recurring joke sign-offs with Shcheglov.