To A. S. Lazarev, 1 November 1889. Moscow.

Written on 1 November 1889 in Moscow to Alexander Semyonovich Lazarev, who wrote under the pen name Gruzinsky – a younger writer and journalist whom Chekhov mentored, corresponded with regularly through the late 1880s, and treated with a mixture of blunt professional criticism and real personal warmth. By this date Chekhov was already an established and busy author (The Wood Demon and the years around Ivanov lie just behind and ahead of this letter), acting here as an informal literary and theatrical advisor to a younger colleague, a role he took on for several correspondents in this period.

The bulk of the letter is a detailed dramaturgical critique of a vaudeville (a one-act comic play) Lazarev had sent him for comment. Chekhov praises the writing but faults the construction: an opening monologue for a minor character (Dasha) that sets up an expectation the play never pays off (the "loaded rifle" image, an early instance of a principle later associated with Chekhov’s dramatic technique generally); a male lead (Gorshkov) whose reminiscences lack tonal variety, which Chekhov illustrates by rewriting a sample line in a more vivid register; and an underused wife character. Chekhov then sketches an alternative four-character structure of his own invention – husband, wife, Gorshkov, and an errand to a bank – ending in slapstick (broken crockery, a man hiding under a table) and a mock-grandiose theatrical flourish invoking Medea and a parody of a storm scene from King Lear. He closes the topic by giving Lazarev the choice of sending the play out as-is or having it returned for revision, with no pressure to hurry.

Shorter items follow in Chekhov’s characteristic epistolary shorthand: a question, without further explanation, about money of Lazarev’s that went missing at "Singer’s" (probably the Singer sewing-machine company’s Moscow office/shop, used here as a bank-like or shipping intermediary); an aside about a play Lazarev was planning to call a "subbotnik" (a term Chekhov uses loosely here for a longer, more ambitious dramatic work, distinct from the vaudeville just discussed) with a wry, self-deprecating remark that he will not live to see it himself; brief health wishes; mock indignation at Lazarev’s having sent him postage stamps unasked (with comic self-comparisons to Gogol’s miserly Plyushkin and to Diogenes) alongside a request for more writing paper and envelopes; frank praise of Lazarev’s recent stories along with pointed craft advice – drop the stock names "Kuzya" and "Semyon" and the flat, "titular councillor" register of his characters, and write with more color and sensory richness (the untranslated word opoponax, kept as a loan in the translation, names a fashionable heavy perfume/resin scent of the period, used here as one item in a list of luxurious, vivid sensory detail); closing regards to Lazarev’s wife; a request that he write and say when he will visit; and a stray, deadpan closing fact – that there really is a town called Balagansk in Siberia – which reads as a private joke or a callback to some exchange between the two men not otherwise preserved in this letter.