To I. L. Leontyev, 12 April 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 12 April 1889 to the writer Ivan Leontyevich Leontyev, who published under the pen name Shcheglov and whom Chekhov addresses here, as elsewhere, by the joking nickname "captain" (a nod to Shcheglov’s earlier career as a professional army officer). The letter is a short, bantering roundup of theater business, literary gossip, and family news rather than a sustained topic.

2 It opens teasing Shcheglov about a superstition of Chekhov’s mother – that his productions of Chekhov’s one-act comedies "The Summer Husband" ("Дачный муж") and "The Proposal" ("Предложение") are doomed because he is staging them on the 13th – and needles him, more seriously, for having over-publicized "The Proposal" in the press since the previous October; Chekhov’s view, restated elsewhere in his letters, is that a minor work should not be trumpeted. He reports that "The Proposal" will after all not go on at the Imperial ("Crown") theaters, tells Shcheglov to stage it as often as he likes, and promises to dedicate a new vaudeville, if it succeeds, to him.

3 The middle of the letter turns to Viktor Bilibin, an editor at the humor weekly Oskolki ("Fragments") and a mutual friend, whom Shcheglov had apparently been encouraging toward vaudeville-writing. Chekhov gives an extended, affectionately backhanded character sketch – decent, talented, but lacking real knowledge of life and therefore daring – and asks Shcheglov not to flatter Bilibin’s vaudeville ambitions, urging a "strict style and elevated feelings" instead.

4 He then reports, in two terse sentences, that his brother "the painter" – Nikolai Chekhov, a professional artist and Chekhov’s elder brother – is seriously ill, and that his own outlook is darkened by it; Nikolai would in fact die of tuberculosis the following June 1889. The letter passes at once from this to a report that Suvorin had told him of Shcheglov’s visit and a conversation about the theater and about a Petersburg police crackdown ("roundup") on homosexuality ("педерастия"), which Chekhov comments on with a sardonic, moralizing aphorism about purity of soul versus purity of body – period phrasing preserved without softening.

5 The letter closes with brief, conventional exchanges (thanks for a congratulatory message, a signature, regards to Shcheglov’s wife) and one substantive aside, appended almost as an afterthought after the signature: Chekhov urges Shcheglov to write a full drama rather than several short comedies, on both artistic and practical (more "profitable") grounds.

7 Corrupted/uncertain text note: in section 6, the phrase "иногда даже б тон" ("at times even a b tone") is anomalous in the source – "б" appears to be a truncated or corrupted word (possibly the start of an adjective modifying "тон," such as a term for a coarse/tabloid register) rather than a complete word in its own right. Rendered literally as "a b tone" rather than reconstructed, per instruction not to invent a bridge over corrupted source text; flagged here for editorial/apparatus attention. The same passage’s "цитварных ребят" ("wormseed children") is a genuine, deliberate Chekhov coinage (from "цитварное семя," wormseed/santonica, a folk vermifuge), not corruption – rendered literally as it plays on breeding sickly, formulaic vaudeville "offspring."