To A. S. Suvorin, 13 December 1891. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 13 декабря 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
A short letter from Moscow to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, written two days after the previous one, that opens as a working editor’s report on a story draft Suvorin has evidently just sent him, then loosens into family and famine-relief news.
Chekhov praises the manuscript with real warmth: a scene in which a character named Varya "smothers" the hero "like a house-spirit" and initiates him into the secrets of the afterlife strikes him as genuinely frightening and true to the logic of spiritualism, and he tells Suvorin not to touch a word of the horseback-riding scene that follows it. His editorial interventions are minor and concrete – swapping one colloquial word for another, "at full gallop" for "at full tilt," a mandolin for a zither – and he pushes back specifically on the story’s epigraph, urging Suvorin to keep the epigraph itself but cut a closing line invoking "our nervous age": for Chekhov, there is no such thing as a modern epidemic of nerves, only nerves as old as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and a frightening story does its work better without the editorializing. He mentions, almost in passing, that he has written his own ending to the story and is sending it along for Suvorin to read if he likes – one working writer offering another a version to take or leave.
The letter then turns personal and practical: a reflection on the pleasure of writing fiction for its own sake, with a nod to the Moscow journalist and raconteur Vladimir Alekseyevich Gilyarovsky’s slang for something not to be dismissed lightly; a recurring headache Chekhov blames on age or worse; an old man’s spontaneous gift of 100 rubles for famine relief, folded in without comment beside the literary discussion; travel plans built around seeing his sister Maria off to inspect the family’s newly bought farmstead and not leaving their aging parents alone over the holidays, with a firm promise to spend New Year’s with Suvorin regardless; and a closing note that he has passed Suvorin’s story to his sister Masha as bedtime reading. The letter ends with the usual sign-off and a note that the proof is enclosed with it.