To Ye. M. Shavrova, 2 September 1891. Bogimovo.

Yelena Mikhailovna Shavrova (later Shavrova-Just) was a young writer whom Chekhov mentored from her teenage years – they had met in Yalta in 1889, when she was still a schoolgirl showing him her first stories, and he went on for years to read her drafts, pass some to Suvorin’s paper for publication, and needle her, half-teasingly, about her writing habits and her romantic entanglements alike. By 1891 she was submitting stories regularly for his verdict, this letter’s business at hand.

Chekhov is apologizing here for a three-month silence over her manuscripts, one of which – "The Little Young Lady" ("Маленькая барышня") – he singles out for praise. Characteristically, he withholds Suvorin’s imprimatur until he can see her in person first; the letter is as much about arranging that meeting as about the verdict on the stories themselves. The reference to the "Loskutnaya" is to the Loskutnaya Hotel, a well-known Moscow hostelry near Red Square where traveling provincials often stayed, and his brother Mikhail’s inference that a stay there meant she was relocating to Petersburg is offered as passed-along gossip, not confirmed fact – Chekhov’s own "So we shall meet in Petersburg, then?" is a genuine question, not a settled plan.

Bogimovo was the country estate south of Moscow, near Aleksin, where Chekhov spent the summer of 1891 – the year of both "The Duel" and, that autumn, the first stirrings of the Sakhalin book – and the second, informal dateline at the head of the letter ("2 September, Aleksin") reflects the nearest post town from which it would actually have been sent, a detail that recurs across the Bogimovo-period letters in this corpus.