To A. I. Smagin, 11 December 1891. Moscow.
А. И. СМАГИНУ, 11 декабря 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
A short, ten-section letter, dated 11 December 1891, from Moscow, to Alexander Ivanovich Smagin – the same Poltava-province landowner and family friend addressed in the companion run of letters from November-December 1891, through whom the Chekhov family was pursuing purchase of a small country property (the "khutor") in the south.
Content: Chekhov thanks Smagin for a telegram and says he will attend to the power of attorney and send money the moment his sister Masha (Marya Pavlovna) telegraphs. He then gives an extended account of a famine-relief scheme he has set up with a friend, a land captain (zemsky nachalnik), in a remote district of Nizhny Novgorod province: buying up peasants’ horses cheaply to save them from being sold off before spring plowing, feeding them over the winter, and returning them to their owners in the spring – framed half-earnestly as a business venture expected to "clear a hundred thousand." He invites Smagin to contribute to the fund at any point before spring, promising a detailed accounting in verse to be composed, on commission, by Vladimir Gilyarovsky, and gives the mailing address of his partner in the scheme. He then answers an apparent accusation that the Chekhovs have lost interest in the playwright/actor Sumbatov (denying it), muses wistfully about the possibility of living near Sorochintsy, asks Smagin to write, and closes with a warm, informal sign-off.
Tone: warm, joking, mock-formal address ("Your Right Honorable," echoing the address used in the day before), shading into genuine enthusiasm and self-mockery over the horse-buying scheme ("boiling, boiling away,clear a hundred thousand"), a brisk denial on Sumbatov’s behalf, and a wistful, almost sentimental note on Sorochintsy before the brief, affectionate close ("Yours with all my soul").