To A. S. Suvorin, 15 October 1889. Moscow.

Written from Moscow shortly after Chekhov’s return from a stay abroad and at Suvorin’s estate, this is a brisk letter of business, favors, and gossip to Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, the wealthy newspaper publisher (Novoye Vremya) who was by this date Chekhov’s closest correspondent, patron, and sometime publisher of his own imprint. 1889 was a hard year for Chekhov – his brother Nikolai had died that summer – and this letter shows him back at ordinary literary business, moving briskly through several unrelated errands he has been deputized to handle on Suvorin’s behalf.

Content, item by item: (1) the publisher Florenty Pavlenkov wants Chekhov’s corrections to the medical section of an almanac, the "Russian Calendar"; Chekhov – drawing on his own training and practice as a physician – explains that hospital statistics (bed counts, patient fees) cannot be verified in time and the update will have to wait a year; he is gathering data informally by asking doctors. (2) A relayed publishing inquiry: the brother of the recently deceased playwright Alexander Ostrovsky has asked, via Chekhov, whether Suvorin will publish the children’s stories of Ostrovsky’s sister, N. N. Ostrovskaya; Chekhov quotes Suvorin’s own earlier answer back to him (a deferral to autumn) and asks where the manuscripts should now be sent – to Suvorin directly, or to an intermediary named Neupokoyev. (3) A second, more forlorn favor: Chekhov recalls a shared reminiscence with Suvorin and his wife Anna Ivanovna about a novel, "The Snezhin Family," by one Raysky, whom Chekhov had agreed to track down; he reports finding the author at last – destitute, undocumented, and recently ruined by a house fire that destroyed his only manuscript copy along with his possessions and his dog, followed by a nervous collapse; the author has since gone silent again. Chekhov then closes with lighter items: a visit from Pyotr Tchaikovsky, whom he flatters and reports a plan to collaborate on an opera libretto (the Onegin reference is to Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, after Pushkin); a worried inquiry about the health of the physician Sergei Botkin, with an aside comparing Botkin to Turgenev and another prominent doctor, Grigory Zakharyin, to Tolstoy, purely "in talent"; and a closing greeting.