To A. S. Suvorin, 28 October 1889. Moskva/.

A short business-and-gossip letter to Alexei Suvorin, the newspaper and publishing magnate (owner of Novoye Vremya) who was Chekhov’s closest correspondent and confidant through the late 1880s and 1890s. Written from Moscow on October 28, 1889, it runs through a string of unrelated items in the loose, itemized manner typical of their correspondence – there is no sign of concatenated or misfiled material; this is one sitting, one letter, moving briskly from topic to topic as Chekhov’s letters to Suvorin often do.

Content, in order: a relay of a request from the actor-playwright Prince Aleksandr Sumbatov-Yuzhin, who wants Suvorin’s guidance on staging "Macbeth" for his benefit performance; a note that the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (the elder Ostrovsky, not to be confused with the sister mentioned) has been by again pressing Suvorin to do as he likes with a book by Ostrovsky’s sister, so long as it brings her name European fame; a report on V. S. Mamyshev, an old acquaintance nicknamed "the Zvenigorod Lecocq" (evidently after the flamboyant detective of Gaboriau’s novels, or possibly the composer – the epithet is a local nickname whose exact origin is not given in the letter), whose declining health – thinning, aging, leg pain, suspected spinal trouble – Chekhov describes with clinical directness, consistent with his medical training; a spirited rebuttal of a political remark by Suvorin about the "liberal opposition," in which Chekhov turns the charge around onto Russian society generally and lands on a characteristic line blaming "crude ignorance" as the root of Russian ills across all parties, closing with wry praise of Suvorin’s admiration for German culture and literacy; a refusal, teasing in tone, to let Suvorin read the manuscript of "The Wood Demon" (Leshy) for fear he’ll discuss it with Grigorovich, followed by an unusually candid, almost self-lacerating aside in which Chekhov calls himself and his fellow "suffering" playwrights whiny and womanish, and says he’s sorry he ever got drawn into writing the play; a request that Suvorin write up the "universal politeness" he’d observed in the Tyrol, and more about France, plus a rueful memory of nearly being killed by a swimming pole Suvorin had once recommended, during a mishap at Yalta; closing regards to Suvorin’s family; a request that "Zhitel" (Villager), the pseudonym of the feuilletonist Alexander Dyakov, who wrote a regular column in Novoye Vremya, be asked to stop overusing the word "appetite" in his pieces; and the signature.