To A. S. Suvorin, 28 August 1891. Bogimovo.

Written from Bogimovo, the Kaluga-province estate Chekhov and his family were renting for the summer of 1891, to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, the newspaper publisher and his closest correspondent of these years. The letter is dense even by Chekhov’s standards, moving in a few paragraphs from a literary favor, to a piece of intrigue he wants placed in Suvorin’s paper under cover of anonymity, to the ordinary business of a summer in the country – estates inspected, patients treated, a telegram gone astray.

The literary occasion is a pamphlet by Kliment Arkadyevich Timiryazev, the Moscow University botanist, attacking what Chekhov calls "charlatan botany" – a public swipe, addressed obliquely, at the zoologist Anatoly Petrovich Bogdanov, a powerful figure in Moscow scientific and academic life whom Chekhov describes as having his hand on everything from zoology to the press. Chekhov wants to send Suvorin a companion note making the same charge against zoology, but insists on anonymity and asks to be paid in a pound of tobacco rather than a fee. His stated reason for secrecy is protective rather than modest: the note’s actual author, he says, is Nikolai Petrovich Wagner, the zoologist who was his houseguest at Bogimovo that summer and who had a doctoral dissertation still pending – exposure would risk Bogdanov’s retaliation against it. Chekhov proposes signing the piece with the single Cyrillic letter Ts to keep the authorship covered.

The line about "yids or ministers" grabbing hold of the press is Chekhov using an ethnic slur casually, in passing, as an example of illegitimate control of print media in the same breath as government ministers – the kind of unexamined period prejudice that appears elsewhere in his correspondence and is translated here at full force rather than softened, per this edition’s policy on genuine slurs in the source.

The rest of the letter is the texture of the Bogimovo summer: Chekhov at work on Sakhalin Island and admitting to boredom and fatigue with life; a story Suvorin’s telegram apparently discouraged, which Chekhov says he would have sent instead to the Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald), a journal that had lately been courting him; a search for a larger estate on Suvorin’s behalf that turned up nothing suitable; complaints about the constant medical calls from local peasants that came with a doctor’s presence in the countryside; and family news – a son born to his brother Aleksandr. The closing inquiry after "Aleksei Aleksandrovich" and his cold refers to Suvorin’s own son.