To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 21 October 1889. Moscow.

Written 21 October 1889 in Moscow to Alexei Nikolaevich Pleshcheev (1825–1893), the poet and senior editor at the journal “Severny Vestnik” (“The Northern Herald”), who by this period had become one of Chekhov’s closest literary confidants and correspondents. The letter is a single continuous piece of private correspondence – one register, one addressee, no internal breaks in occasion – opening with a double dateline (the full date, then a shorthand repetition, both original to the source) and closing with the ordinary sign-off and signature.

Content is a characteristic Chekhov miscellany of literary business and comic self-deprecation, moving briskly between unrelated topics in short paragraphs: his own middling health and mood; a favor for an unnamed doctor-acquaintance who wants two of his own poems placed in the “Northern Herald” (Chekhov asks Pleshcheev to send a polite deferral rather than a rejection, so Chekhov can relay it without embarrassment); a defense of the actor Svobodin, who had evidently traveled to see Chekhov at real expense over a play that then fell through; anxious, ironic speculation about the fate of his own play (almost certainly "The Wood Demon" ["Leshy"], named explicitly in), including a report that a newspaper had called it a "dramatized tale" rather than a proper play – read by Chekhov as either an admission of his own dramaturgical weakness or the hypocrisy of friends who publicly praise him while privately damning the work with faint description; gossip about the departure and likely return of the critic Sergei Yuzhakov from "Northern Herald," delivered with mock-elaborate sarcasm about the soporific effect of his prose; a recommendation not to let go of the critic Vladimir Stasov; a notably frank defense of a young woman, Katya, against rumors that her relationship with an older professor was romantic or sexual – Chekhov argues from the existence of platonic affection between people and explicitly frames the alternative as a "sexual perversion" (russianполовое извращение) that would interest only a psychiatrist as a minor case history; a wry pivot comparing Moscow’s bad weather to that same phrase; and a closing note about preparing a new collection of stories, revising older pieces.