To A. P. Lensky, 27 September 1889. Moscow.

This short, playful note goes to Alexander Pavlovich Lensky (1847-1908), one of the leading actors and directors of the Maly Theatre in Moscow and a friend Chekhov corresponded with warmly through the late 1880s. It opens not with a salutation but with a mock-heroic couplet lampooning Lensky’s range as a performer – Hamlet and Othello onstage, King Lear in drawing-room company, and, among friends, "Masaniello" – a reference to the mute fisherman-hero of Auber’s opera *La Muette de Portici* (the title character, Masaniello, leads a Neapolitan uprising and is prone to wild mood swings before his death). Chekhov immediately undercuts his own joke by asking, in mock innocence, what "Masaniello" is even supposed to mean – a bit of self-deflating humor typical of his private letters to theater friends.

The substance of the letter is brief and practical. Chekhov reports regret at having missed Lensky on a Sunday evening because he and his household had gone to hear Dargomyzhsky’s opera "Rusalka." He then gives a rare, concrete progress report on his own work: he has sent off a novella (almost certainly "A Boring Story" / "Скучная история," which he was completing in this period) and has begun a new play, already a half of Act One in, which he expects to finish by 20 October if nothing intervenes – this is "The Wood Demon" ("Леший"), the play he would later substantially rework into "Uncle Vanya." He gives its early cast shape: seven male roles and four female, not counting servants and guests. He mentions plans to see the play "Село Знаменское" ("The Village of Znamenskoye") the next day and hopes to see Lensky there or after.

The letter closes with regards to Lidia Nikolaevna – Lensky’s wife, the actress Lidia (Lidiya) Nikolaevna Kupriyanova-Lenskaya – and a mock- elevated flourish of regards to "the most pious, most autocratic Alexander Alexandrovich, known as Sasik." The grandiose titling ("благочестивейший, самодержавнейший," echoing formal address to a tsar) paired with the diminutive pet-name "Sasik" is a joke whose target is not firmly identifiable from the letter alone – it most plausibly refers to a Lensky family member or household pet rather than any public figure; apparatus-building should flag this name for entity research rather than assume an identification.