To A. S. Suvorin, 17 April 1889. Moscow.

1 Written from Moscow on 17 April 1889 to the publisher Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, Chekhov’s regular correspondent and patron and the owner of the newspaper Novoye Vremya. The letter follows the double dateline pattern seen elsewhere in this stretch of the corpus (1-2, "17 April 1889. Moscow." and the shorthand "17 April"); a separate letter to Elena Mikhailovna Lintvaryova, also dated 17 April 1889, was written the same day and gives the fuller, unguarded account of the family crisis that this letter to Suvorin only glances at in passing. Where the Lintvaryova letter is grave and detailed, this one is a short, bantering roundup – theater business, literary gossip, a dream, a criminal case – closing with a mock-official signature.

2 Chekhov opens by trading regrets with Suvorin over travel plans: Suvorin envies Chekhov’s youth, Chekhov envies Suvorin’s trip to the Tyrol, and he proposes they simply swap places (3). He reports his election to the committee of the Society of Dramatic Writers, with a cynical aside about the Society’s loudest complainers being its least invested members, and offers Suvorin a short satirical piece against these "rebels" for Novoye Vremya, to run in place of the Saturday feuilleton, or failing that to be sent to the "Pet. Gaz." instead (5). He passes on a whimsical line from a "bulletin of spring" sent by an acquaintance in Kursk (6), mentions having begun his play "The Wood Demon" out of boredom and comparing it unfavorably to Lessing’s "Nathan the Wise," while still boasting he will one day wring several thousand rubles from a theater management in a single season (7), notes that Suvorin’s own play "Tatyana Repina" is running in Moscow with cuts – the actress Medvedeva no longer appearing in Act III (8) – muses aloud, half in jest, about marrying or shipping out as a doctor on a Volunteer Fleet steamer (9), asks Suvorin to have Shcheglov look into a topical murder case for its feuilleton potential, noting that Shcheglov has gone quiet with him, presumably out of pique over an earlier piece (10), and signs off with a plain "Keep well" (11) followed by a two-line mock-bureaucratic title in place of a normal signature (12-14).

4 No corruption or editorial gap markers appear in the source; the letter is complete and internally coherent as a single short document, with no sign of archival concatenation with unrelated back-matter.