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

Written 26 November 1891 from Moscow to Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin (1834–1912), the wealthy publisher of "Novoye Vremya" and Chekhov’s closest correspondent and confidant in these years.

Chekhov reports on an awkward errand. Alexander Dmitryevich Kurepin – a "Novoye Vremya" feuilletonist, dying at this time – has a wife who summoned Chekhov and asked him to support her request to Suvorin for a 500-ruble loan. Chekhov agrees to pass the request along but plainly doesn’t want to vouch for it: he lays out, point by point, why it’s a dubious ask – Kurepin is unconscious and near death and has no need of money himself; Mrs. Kurepin has her own salaried position under Levinsky at "Budilnik" ("The Alarm Clock"); and, most tellingly, the previous 500 rubles Suvorin sent Kurepin was never spent but banked, inaccessible without penalty before March 1. Chekhov notes she could repay a loan, and that she told him about the banked money herself, apparently in confidence – he is visibly uncomfortable relaying information she may not have meant for Suvorin to have. He then turns to lighter literary news: a German translation of his story collection "V sumerkakh" ("In the Twilight") has arrived, and he needles Suvorin about a Moscow feuilleton Suvorin wrote the previous Saturday, insisting – ironically – that Suvorin’s quip about the actresses Yermolova and Fedotova being in love with each other was genuinely witty, and wishing the censor were as fond of Suvorin as Chekhov is. He reports his health improving, presses Suvorin to finish "The Duel" this week and get the book out before Christmas, praises a recent feuilleton by Sergei Atava (Terpigorev), and describes a visit from Gurevich, the editress of "Severny Vestnik," whom he finds personable but no journalist – so lost in literary matters, he says, that she understands them the way a Spaniard understands Russian peasants. She had criticized the critic Mikhailovsky, which Chekhov, suspecting the influence of "Phylloxera," met by praising him instead. He closes with good wishes to Suvorin’s wife and family, signs off, and adds a postscript inquiring after Suvorin’s cough and offering half-joking doctor’s orders to dress warmly and stay indoors after sundown.

Textual note: the source has "Курении" at the point where the letter plainly means Kurepin (the same person named at the start and end of) – a typographical slip in the source text, rendered here as "Kurepin" for consistency, per the corpus’s fidelity-to-sense convention for evident source typos.