To Redaktor "smolenskogo Vestnika", December 1889. Moscow.

This is not a personal letter but a public appeal, written to be printed: Chekhov writes to the editor of the "Smolensk Herald," a provincial newspaper in Smolensk Province, asking him to publish a notice on behalf of a sick and destitute acquaintance. The letter is undated beyond "mid- December 1889," Moscow, per the editors of the Soviet Academy edition (Polnoe sobranie sochineniy i pisem, 1974-1983).

The subject is Nikolai Apollonovich Putyata, a nobleman of Smolensk Province and son of one of its largest landowners, who had worked as a literary translator and had privately edited three now-defunct Moscow periodicals: "Mirskoy Tolk" ("Worldly Talk"), "Svet i Teni" ("Light and Shadows"), and the "European Library" ("Evropeyskaya Biblioteka"). Some two or three years before this letter, Putyata contracted a severe chronic pneumonia that left him unable to work, and by the time of writing he is bedridden, penniless, and living in squalid conditions ("in filth, in foul air") with no realistic hope of recovery. Chekhov explains that he and others have already exhausted the ordinary channels of literary charity on Putyata’s behalf – the Literary Fund (Literaturny fond), the Moscow newspapers, fellow writers – and that the only remaining hope is to reach relatives and friends of Putyata’s back in his home province, who may not know of his illness or even his current address. Chekhov asks the editor to run a notice, gives Putyata’s full name (with Putyata’s written consent to be named), and supplies his Moscow address for anyone wishing to help.

The letter is a small but characteristic instance of Chekhov’s practical, unglamorous charity work on behalf of sick and struggling literary men – the same impulse that runs through his role at the Literary Fund and his later famine-relief and Sakhalin efforts. There is nothing to.