To A. S. Lazarev, 23 November 1889. Moscow.

Written in Moscow on 23 November 1889 to Alexander Semyonovich Lazarev, who wrote under the pen name Gruzinsky, a younger writer and playwright whom Chekhov mentored and helped place with editors and theater managers. The letter is brisk, businesslike, and affectionate in the usual Chekhov register toward proteges: half practical instruction, half needling encouragement, closing with a scrap of unrelated gossip.

Content: Chekhov reports that Lazarev’s play (referred to by the diminished title Gorshkov, i.e. "the Gorshkov play") will go to the Abramova theater in Moscow, and that he – Chekhov – will hand it personally to the actor/director N. N. Solovtsov. He returns Lazarev’s other play, Who Won (Кто победил), explaining that the journal The Artist (Артист) only publishes plays already cleared by the dramatic censor and slated for production, so Lazarev should instead make two fair copies and submit them to the censor himself; Chekhov supplies a ready-made template petition addressed to the Chief Directorate for Press Affairs (Главное управление по делам печати), the tsarist-era censorship body, specifying the two required 80-kopeck revenue stamps. Chekhov then explains the follow-up mechanics: the censor-stamped copy should come back to him so he can pass it to Rassokhin’s lithography shop for stage-copy printing, and he dismisses the idea of publishing in The Artist as pointless if the play isn’t actually going to be staged. He offers general professional advice on timing – write plays in winter but aim them at the following autumn season, as he did with his own one-act farces The Bear (Медведь) and The Proposal (Предложение), each written about six months ahead of its season – and tells Lazarev not to be discouraged if his plays miss this season’s slate, promising to discuss it further when Lazarev is next in Moscow. He also suggests the title Who Won is "a bit precious and pretentious" and asks Lazarev to rename it in one word. He closes with an unrelated jab of office gossip: Leikin (Nikolai Leikin, editor of Oskolki, Chekhov’s early employer and frequent correspondent) was unimpressed by the 1889 Paris Exposition (the world’s fair that produced the Eiffel Tower), which Chekhov turns into a mock-alarm, dryly pitying "the poor French."

This looks like a slip – possibly Chekhov’s own pen, possibly a transcription/typesetting error in the source corpus – but it is preserved exactly as it stands in the Russian source rather than silently corrected, since it is what the document actually contains.