To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 3 September 1889. Sumy.

Written from Luka, the Lintvaryov family estate on the Psyol river near Sumy (in what is now Ukraine), where Chekhov and his family had been summering. The letter marks the end of that stay: he is about to leave, on the night train, for Moscow. His correspondent, Aleksei Nikolaevich Pleshcheyev, was the poet and elder statesman of the "Severny Vestnik" ("Northern Herald") circle – a generation older than Chekhov, a former political exile (of the Petrashevsky circle, mock-executed alongside Dostoevsky in 1849), and by this point one of Chekhov’s most trusted literary correspondents and an informal patron/gatekeeper for the journal.

Content: travel logistics and mock-heroic complaint about the journey ahead (section 3); news that the story promised to "Severny Vestnik" is finished but that Chekhov wants to hold it back a little longer to revise – almost certainly "Пари" ("A Boring Story" / "Скучная история" territory, though unnamed here; the letter does not identify the story by title, so no title should be inferred in the apparatus) and is anxious about its unfamiliar "motifs" (section 4); social notes on the Lintvaryov family, especially the son Georgy ("Zhorzhik") (section 5); the Smagins’ absence this year (section 6); a wry, faintly ungallant physical joke about a young woman, "Vata," and her mother having arrived, with Vata anticipating marriage (section 7); requests/gossip about theatrical matters – Pleshcheyev’s own stage writing, and Ludovic Halévy, whom Chekhov wanted to read about in "Russkiye Vedomosti" but could not find a copy (section 8); business of the Society for Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers, of which Chekhov was on the committee, including the actresses Goreva and Abramova (section 9); an extended assessment of the theatrical manager/writer Pyotr Boborykin and his troupe (section 10); closing regards and an embrace (section 11); signature (section 12); a one-line postscript that Zhorzhik will write separately (section 13).

the file is a single letter with a doubled dateline (an outer formal date, section 1, and Chekhov’s own informal dateline as he wrote it, section 2 – a pattern already seen elsewhere in this correspondence and not a structural anomaly), followed by an unbroken sequence of paragraphs on a single occasion, a closing, a signature, and a brief postscript.