To A. S. Suvorin, 13 October 1891. Moscow.

Written from Moscow on 13 October 1891 to Alexey Sergeyevich Suvorin, Chekhov’s publisher and close correspondent. The bulk of the letter is a detailed report on negotiations over a proposed literary Sbornik (collection/almanac) for famine relief: Chekhov describes a warm meeting with the editors of Russkiye Vedomosti – named here as Sobolevsky and Chuprov – who agreed to underwrite the collection’s expenses and responded to Suvorin’s involvement with unusual personal warmth, addressing him by name and patronymic rather than by surname. He then relays the editorial board’s practical objections to a proposal to enlarge the project’s fundraising target: a fixed December publication deadline, material still only promised and not yet in hand from contributors, and the mismatched production schedules of newspapers (which can move fast) versus monthly journals (which cannot), concluding that the enlargement would push publication back to spring. He adds an unofficial account of rival publications’ likely noncooperation: Russkaya Mysl is said to be planning a competing Sbornik of its own, and Novosti is on bad terms with Russkiye Vedomosti.

Amid this business the letter confirms, in passing, what the letter to V. A. Wagner of 10 October 1891 already reported: the feuilleton "The Conjurers" (Fokusniki) has now been printed, and Chekhov again asks that its authorship be kept secret – consistent with the earlier letter’s account of a stopped telegram arriving too late. The remainder is the ordinary miscellany of Chekhov’s correspondence with Suvorin: a note that a private fundraising initiative by a Madame Morozova was refused by the minister (donations being restricted to diocesan authorities and the Red Cross), word that Chekhov is delayed in Moscow awaiting a passport from Petersburg, a terse line that his aunt is dying, a suggestion that Novoye Vremya consider a weekly edition, and a closing complaint of bad weather, no money, interrupted work, and his pet mongoose’s antics – the mongoose recurs across the autumn 1891 letters as a fixture of the Chekhov household.