To F. A. Chervinsky, 18 August 1391. Bogimovo.

Dated 18 August in the source, from Bogimovo, the estate near Aleksin in Tula Province that Chekhov and his family rented for the summer of 1891 (the letter’s own dateline, in, gives the nearby town, Aleksin, rather than the estate name – the two datelines in and refer to the same day and locality; this dual archival-heading-plus-internal-dateline pattern is standard for this corpus’s segmentation and is not a sign of two different documents).

The addressee is Fyodor Alekseevich Chervinsky, a minor poet and writer Chekhov was mentoring in a small way. Chervinsky has evidently written asking for help getting a collection of his own work ("your little book") published, and Chekhov – who had planned to visit his own publisher and patron Aleksey Suvorin in Feodosia (Crimea) that August and raise the matter in person – explains he can no longer make the trip for unspecified "domestic reasons" and instead redirects Chervinsky to deal directly with Suvorin’s printing house on Ertelev Lane in St. Petersburg, naming the manager there, Arkady Ilyich Neupokoev, who can quote a production cost. Chekhov offers to write to Suvorin himself once Chervinsky has the particulars. He also asks Chervinsky, if convenient, to find out the pay rate at the magazine Niva, mentioning he has "a suitable little story" he might place there, but explicitly tells him not to go out of his way for it.

The letter closes with a bantering, slightly ironic personal note: Chekhov wishes Chervinsky the Order of St. Stanislaus (a common civil-service decoration, invoked here half-mockingly as a stock good wish) and success marrying a woman with "those mysterious blue eyes" Chervinsky had apparently mentioned in his own letter, adding the wry aside that any bride would take a man who serves in the Senate – a joke about the social cachet of a government sinecure rather than a literal endorsement.