To A. S. Suvorin, 11 December 1891. Moscow.

A short, rapid-fire letter from Moscow to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, covering business, family news, and gossip in quick, disconnected bursts – seventeen brief paragraphs jumping from an accounting matter to a headache to a literary judgment on Tolstoy.

Chekhov opens by settling a fee for a feuilleton and reminding Suvorin, half in jest, that he still owes him 170 rubles personally, apart from what the newspaper owes – a debt he promises to clear by spring. He muses, not quite seriously, about what it would be like to run a Moscow bureau for Suvorin’s paper, Novoye Vremya, himself, before insisting he has no intention of settling in Moscow. He then defends Varvara Alekseyevna Morozova, the Moscow philanthropist and patron of famine relief, against a swipe Suvorin had made at her in print under the pseudonym "Akaky of Moscow" – Chekhov reports that she was genuinely hurt by it, given how much charitable work she in fact does.

The letter turns to Chekhov’s chronic money troubles (he blames his broken promises to visit on simply having no cash on hand) and to the famine-relief soup kitchens he and Suvorin were then organizing in Nizhny Novgorod province, a project he mentions with unusual, repeated enthusiasm. He asks after a manuscript from Ivan Yakovlevich Gurlyand, a Moscow journalist and sometime contributor, and passes on high praise for a piece Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy had contributed to a charitable Sbornik (miscellany) on running soup kitchens – practical and plainspoken enough, in the estimate of Russkiye Vedomosti editor Vasily Mikhailovich Sobolevsky, to belong in an official government gazette rather than a literary collection. The letter closes with routine business (proofs and a telegram received, advance copies of the forthcoming Duel requested through the Moscow shop rather than by post) and a plain, understated pair of complaints – a headache, bad sleep – typical of the letter’s unadorned, ailing-and-overworked tone.