To V. N. Davydov, 26 April 1889. Sumy.
В. Н. ДАВЫДОВУ, 26 апреля 1889 г. Сумы.
Headnote
1 Written from the Lintvaryova estate at Sumy (Kharkov province) on 26 April 1889 to Vladimir Nikolaevich Davydov, the well-known comic actor of the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, already established in this corpus as the recipient of Chekhov’s "Calchas" manuscript. The letter follows the double dateline pattern seen elsewhere in this stretch of the corpus (1-2, "26 April 1889. Sumy." and the shorthand "26 April. Sumy, Kharkov province, the Lintvaryova estate."), and dates from Chekhov’s 1889 summer sojourn at Luka, the Lintvaryov family’s estate on the Psel river.
2 Chekhov asks Davydov to let him know the day and hour he will pass through en route from Kiev to Kharkov, proposing to meet him briefly at the Sumy station during the train’s fifteen-minute stop, and describes his own rural idleness – sleeping, catching crayfish, and troubled by stomach complaints (3). He sends greetings to the actor N. N. Solovtsov and the actress N. D. Rybchinskaya and "all who know" him, and explains he cannot come to Kiev himself because his brother is ill and cannot be left (4). He closes with a brief blessing (5) and signs off (6).
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.