To A. S. Suvorin, 26 October 1891. Moscow.

Written from Moscow on 26 October 1891, the letter is short and businesslike, moving through several unrelated errands before closing on a private note.

The opening item concerns the famine-relief fund "New Times" was collecting: a small sum from the pupils of the Rzhevskaya boarding school is to be acknowledged in print, with the money passed along to Alexei Alexeyevich, Suvorin’s son, who was handling such donations for the paper. Chekhov then talks Suvorin’s associate "Al. Al." out of an ill-timed trip to inspect a property near Zaraysk, on both practical grounds (bad roads, a cold) and characteristically self-interested ones (he’d rather have him to dinner at Testov’s, a well-known Moscow restaurant). The request to print "The Duel" only once a week rather than twice reflects Chekhov’s ongoing discomfort with anything that looks like special treatment from the paper – a recurring theme in these months, alongside his wry deflection of gossip about an engagement to "the rich Sibiryakova," evidently a rumor circulating among the Petersburg literary crowd with no basis in fact.

The letter’s real center is the paragraph on rereading "War and Peace" at night, which gives one of Chekhov’s clearest statements of his resistance to Tolstoy’s Napoleon: he finds the novel’s ordinary characters – Pierre, Prince Andrei, even the "insignificant" Nikolai Rostov – rendered with full naturalness, while Napoleon is bent out of shape to serve the book’s argument that he was a lesser man than he was. The following section, on Prince Andrei’s wound, lets Chekhov’s own medical training show through: his complaint that a wealthy, well-tended patient’s wound could still turn gangrenous is less a literary quibble than a physician’s judgment on the state of medicine in the era the novel depicts, and the closing line about Tolstoy "soaking himself through with hatred for medicine" while writing it anticipates Chekhov’s later, more developed objections to Tolstoy’s moralizing about doctors and disease.

The abrupt final line – "Keep well. My aunt has died." – is characteristic of the letters’ rapid tonal shifts: domestic news delivered flatly, without commentary, immediately before the closing formula.