To A. S. Suvorin, 2 July 1889. Sumy.

1 Written from Sumy on 2 July 1889 to Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov’s publisher and closest confidant, a little over two weeks after the death of Chekhov’s brother Nikolai on 17 June – the same loss Chekhov describes at length in his letter to Alexei Pleshcheyev of 26 June. Suvorin was travelling in the Tyrol at the time. This is a short, hastily written note ("forgive me for writing on a scrap"), coordinating travel plans – Chekhov was weighing a side trip to Odessa before joining Suvorin abroad – and closing with news of his household and a memorial gift.

2 Chekhov opens by apologizing for the scrap of paper, then answers a letter just received from Suvorin: since Suvorin will be a full month in the Tyrol, Chekhov now has time to detour to Odessa, which draws him for no reason he can name, before crossing the border; he will not leave Kiev on Tuesday as originally telegraphed, and will wire further updates from the border town of Volochisk and then from Odessa itself. He reports his brother Nikolai’s death in a single flat, exhausted sentence, followed by a short burst of numb, sardonic resignation – "not a farthing’s worth of poetry left in life... to hell with it" – echoing, far more tersely, the grief detailed in the Pleshcheyev letter of six days earlier. He sends greetings to Suvorin’s family and a formal hand-kiss to Suvorin’s wife, gives an address for a return wire (the Severnaya Hotel in Odessa), and after a typographic break reports that his own brother, nicknamed "the Drunkard," is staying with him and living soberly, and never in fact had the typhus once feared for him. He closes by telling Suvorin not to worry over the cost of his telegrams, since Chekhov means to donate that sum toward a scholarship, to be endowed in memory of Suvorin’s son Alexei Alexeyevich, at a cadet corps that the sugar magnate Kharitonenko was building; a warm closing wish for Suvorin’s happiness and rest, and the signature.