To A. S. Suvorin, 18 November 1891. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 18 ноября 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
This is a two-part letter written in Moscow on 18 November 1891 to Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, the newspaper publisher and Chekhov’s closest correspondent through these years, followed a day or so later by a continuation prompted by a reply that crossed it in the post. It falls in the same autumn stretch as the Smagin note of 13 November: Chekhov is still hunting for a "khutor," a modest farmstead, and still fighting the influenza and chest cough that had settled in that November.
The letter opens on literary business – a story Suvorin has promised and not sent – before turning, in its longest section, to a sharper matter: Suvorin has apparently written to Chekhov confessing himself a sinner in some public dispute touching the philosopher and critic Vladimir Solovyov, who had declared himself Orthodox. Chekhov pushes back hard, comparing Suvorin’s self-flagellating "I am a sinner" to the Pope’s title of Holiness answered, out of spite, by the Eastern Church’s "slave of the slaves of God" – and argues that confessional labels like Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic are civil facts of a passport, not personal merit badges, so Solovyov claimed nothing exceptional by calling himself Orthodox. The letter then turns practical and rueful: Chekhov’s health is not improving, he refuses to submit to examination even as he takes the waters and quinine, and he closes the first part with a request that Suvorin write, since he is "cruelly bored."
The continuation, prompted by a letter from Suvorin that arrived just after Chekhov’s own was sent, corrects Suvorin’s assumption that the planned move to a farmstead means withdrawing from him – Chekhov insists the opposite, that a house outside Moscow would let him winter in Petersburg near Suvorin instead. It carries a passing, untranslated- soft rebuke of Suvorin’s prejudice against Ukrainians (the source uses the ethnic slur "khokhly"), which Chekhov answers by praising the Poltava peasantry as substantial, well-fed, cheerful people rather than the figures of fun Suvorin apparently takes them for. The bulk of the second half is an unusually detailed home remedy for the cough – turpentine sprayed from an atomizer and its fumes inhaled, mineral water, quinine, avoiding theater drafts and hot food, dressing warmly indoors "like a hothouse plant" – valuable both as a record of Chekhov’s own illness that winter and of the folk-and-patent medicine available to a physician-writer treating himself. It ends, characteristically, by steering back to work: a proposal that the two of them write a play together that summer.