To I. I. Gorbunov-Posadov, 4 September 1891. Moscow.
И. И. ГОРБУНОВУ-ПОСАДОВУ, 4 сентября 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
Ivan Ivanovich Gorbunov-Posadov was the editor and moving force of Posrednik ("The Intermediary"), the publishing house Tolstoy had helped found to put cheap, morally improving booklets – folk tales, retellings of Western literature, popular science, simplified classics – into the hands of the Russian peasantry. Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, named at the end of this letter as the forwarding address, was Tolstoy’s closest disciple and the effective head of the whole Tolstoyan publishing and propaganda apparatus; letters and parcels for Gorbunov-Posadov often passed through him. By the early 1890s Chekhov had a genuine, if not uncritical, sympathy for the Posrednik project and corresponded with its circle, sending and receiving books.
This short note is a thank-you for a parcel of Posrednik pamphlets: cheap editions of Tolstoy and Leskov, a life of Epictetus, illustrated retellings, and a Pushkin fairy tale, evidently sent for Chekhov’s opinion or simply as a courtesy to a well-known writer with Posrednik sympathies. The letter is practical and warm rather than literary – an inventory of what pleased him (the Tolstoy and Leskov pieces, the vignettes), followed by a request that two further items be forwarded to his Moscow address on Malaya Dmitrovka. The "Danila the Conscientious" and the Pushkin-tale vignettes he singles out, like "Vanka" and "The Womenfolk" (Бабы) he asks to have sent on, were themselves part of the Posrednik list of morally exemplary or folk-adjacent booklets – the kind of unpretentious, wide-reaching literature the press existed to produce. Chekhov’s own story "Vanka" (1886) shares its title with one of the items mentioned, though the "Vanka" here is a Posrednik publication rather than Chekhov’s own tale.
The envelope address preserved at the end – routed via Chertkov in Rossosha, Voronezh province, for forwarding to Gorbunov-Posadov – is a small piece of postal history: proof of how tightly the Tolstoyan publishing network’s internal mail depended on Chertkov as its hub, even for correspondents like Chekhov who stood outside the movement proper.