To K. M. Fofanov, 14 November 1891. Moscow.
К. М. ФОФАНОВУ, 14 ноября 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow to Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov, a poet Chekhov knew personally, on a small piece of literary-charity business. Dmitry Nikolayevich Anuchin, a professor overseeing a "Miscellany" to be published by the newspaper Russkiye Vedomosti for the relief of the famine of 1891, had asked Chekhov – as an acquaintance of Fofanov’s – to press him for a promised poem before the volume went to print. The letter is brief and purely functional: a relayed request, a note that printing has already begun, and a polite nudge that time is short. It is a small window onto Chekhov’s own role that autumn as an informal literary broker for famine-relief publishing, a role that intensified over the following months as the 1891-92 famine worsened.