To A. S. Suvorin, 27 November 1891. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 27 ноября 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow on 27 November 1891 to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, the newspaper publisher and Chekhov’s closest correspondent of these years. A short, businesslike letter mixing literary placement, a personal favor, and family news.
Chekhov reports summoning Nikolai Mikhailovich Yezhov by telegram and spending an evening coaching him on how to break into journalism – lean on general-interest subjects with practical appeal – and notes Yezhov’s plan to write in partnership with his friend Aleksandr Semyonovich Lazarev, who published under the pen name Gruzinsky. Chekhov’s assessment of Yezhov (sensible but needing to be "kept on a rein") is characteristically double-edged: encouraging in substance, skeptical in tone.
The literary business is an unnamed topical story on the 1891 famine, placed with the Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald) at 250 rubles per printer’s signature, plus a second story going the next day to the journal Sever (The North). Chekhov also asks Suvorin to buy him lottery tickets in the state five-ruble loan drawing, a small domestic errand recurring in letters of this period, and reports that proofreading for The Duel is running behind schedule, which he fears will push the book’s publication past December.
The letter closes with a wish to move the family to a farmstead (a recurring Chekhov daydream of these Moscow years, later realized at Melikhovo) and a note that two manuscripts – presumably submissions routed to Chekhov for an opinion, per his usual role as an informal literary gatekeeper for Suvorin’s paper – have arrived and will be read that night.