To A. S. Suvorin, 7 December 1889. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 7 декабря 1889 г. Москва.
Headnote
By December 1889 Chekhov was twenty-nine, exhausted, and in mourning: his brother Nikolai had died of tuberculosis that June, and the trip to Sakhalin that would consume most of 1890 was already taking shape in his mind. Aleksei Suvorin, the wealthy publisher of "Novoye Vremya" ("New Time"), was by now Chekhov’s chief correspondent, editor, occasional creditor, and closest thing to a confidant among the literary establishment; this letter shows the working texture of that relationship – manuscript editing, favors for third parties, family news, and health bulletins – in one characteristic sitting.
The letter opens on editorial business: Chekhov has just cut a manuscript by a writer named Ovsyannikov roughly in half for publication, overriding corrections made by Suvorin’s colleague Viktor Burenin, a "Novoye Vremya" critic. The story evidently dramatized the trial of a clerk (a copyist, "pisar’") who had been executed, with a character modeled on or invoking Leo Tolstoy ("graf Tolstoy," lit. "Count Tolstoy") arguing for clemency on grounds of the clerk’s supposed idiocy while the narration simultaneously makes him implausibly eloquent and pious – a contradiction Chekhov finds artistically dishonest and flags sharply. The specific manuscript and the "executed clerk" case have not been further identified for this edition; treat "Ovsyannikov" as an otherwise-unidentified contributor to Suvorin’s paper.
Chekhov declines a trip to Petersburg, citing a bad cough and fear of hemoptysis (coughing blood) – an early, guarded sign of the tuberculosis that would not be openly acknowledged for years and would eventually kill him; this is a notable early-symptom data point for the corpus. He passes on gossip about the physician Sergei Botkin’s suspected liver disease (Botkin, personal physician to the imperial family, was himself a renowned internist, which sharpens the irony of "Botkin’s heel" – his own diagnostic blind spot for his own body), and reports without much sentiment the death of the epidemiologist Andrei Dobroslavin from typhoid.
Two favors follow: Prince Aleksandr Sumbatov (the playwright and actor better known by his stage name Yuzhin) wants books about Macbeth, to be routed through Chekhov; and Chekhov recommends the journalist S. N. Filippov to Suvorin for work in Petersburg, with pointed, backhanded praise (a "good worker" who nonetheless shows up empty-handed and must be given made-up assignments) and a comparison to Suvorin’s existing feuilletonist Aleksandr Kurepin. "Tatyana Repina" is Suvorin’s own play.
The letter closes with an extended, wry account of Chekhov’s social life: a colleague’s bachelor party at which Chekhov served as best man ("shafer") to a ballerina bride, a meditation on his own indifference to ballet traceable to a university infatuation, and a visit to a former ballerina turned dramatic actress whose stance still betrays her training – described in unusually physical, almost clinical terms, down to a small diagram-in-words of her foot position ("a and b" as the toes). None of this is softened in translation; it is frank, appraising, and typical of the loose, gossipy register Chekhov used only with Suvorin. He signs off with a rare note of melancholy about turning thirty in January ("Здравствуй, одинокая старость" – "Welcome, lonely old age"), then sends greetings to Suvorin’s wife Anna Ivanovna, his daughter "Nastyusha" (Anastasia), a family friend or relative referred to as "Berka," and Suvorin’s son Aleksei Alekseyevich, teased about his annual pilgrimages to Palestine and his work on a "Stoglav" (a historical/ecclesiastical project; the title literally references the 16th-century "Stoglav" church council, used here loosely/jokingly for whatever Aleksei Alekseyevich the younger is working on).