To A. M. Yevreinova, 24 September 1889. Moscow.

Anna Mikhailovna Evreinova was the editor of the journal Severny Vestnik ("The Northern Herald"), and by 1889 one of the few women in Russia to hold a doctorate in law (earned abroad, since Russian universities did not grant them to women). Chekhov had placed several stories with her, including "The Name-Day Party" earlier that year. Here he sends her "A Dreary Story (From the Notes of an Old Man)" – one of his most substantial works to date, a first-person narrative voiced by a dying elderly professor of medicine – and follows the submission with a short list of practical requests: the number of author’s offprints, insistence on seeing proofs, a plea to keep the story intact in a single issue rather than splitting it across two, and instructions for how he would like his fee paid.

Two points call for a gloss. First, the joke about the censor: the story’s opening scene evokes an "iconostasis" (the icon-screen in an Orthodox church) in a description of medals arranged on the narrator’s chest – Chekhov anticipates that the word’s proximity to a mildly irreverent, worldly context might draw a censor’s objection, and pre-clears a fallback substitution ("constellation"). almost certainly to Anna Grigoryevna Sibiryakova (nee Kuvshinnikova’s circle is a different family; this is likely a Evreinova-circle acquaintance or a matter under discussion between them, such as a submission, a subscription, or a mutual acquaintance’s affairs) that the two correspondents evidently both understood from prior exchange; nothing in this letter disambiguates it further, and it should be flagged for the entities/mentions stage as low-confidence rather than resolved here.