To A. S. Suvorin, 17 December 1891. Moscow.

Checked against the source for genuine multi-item concatenation (the failure mode seen elsewhere in this corpus) – none found; this is one letter.

Dating and setting: 17 December 1891, written from Moscow, to Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin.

The bulk of the letter is detailed editorial advice on a story of Suvorin’s, evidently a piece turning on a ghostly visitation. Chekhov argues at length that a maidservant character should be cut entirely, on the grounds that her presence is an unmotivated coincidence that both overcomplicates an already tangled plot and drains its tension; he insists nothing need be explained to the reader, since Suvorin’s own skill and the story’s dialogue already point the reader toward an ambiguity about the nervous system and unexplained phenomena, without anyone stopping to ask overt "why." He works through the story’s internal logic character by character: why the dead Varya appears to the character Vitalin (she left too forceful, too commanding a memory of herself not to haunt him), and why the character Natasha currently reads as unclear (Suvorin, he suggests, tired by the end of the draft and didn’t fully work out her motivation) – proposing that Natasha be made to love Vitalin jealously and to know of his past affair with Varya, so that her nighttime visions of Varya become legible to the reader. He closes the editorial section with a macabre suggested twist: that Vitalin, groping in the dark, mistakenly embraces a skeleton instead of Natasha, so that she wakes to find the skeleton beside her in bed and Vitalin dead on the floor.

Business follows: Chekhov says he’ll think over a Moscow feuilleton Suvorin has evidently proposed, but that he would rather write a Christmastide story (a seasonal genre-piece tied to the Orthodox Christmas season, a recurring commission Chekhov both wrote and grumbled about across these years). He reports having sent along a story by a writer named Povodov for Suvorin to look over, asking for proof if it’s accepted, and mentions in passing that he has written a vaudeville and, with wry exaggeration, that he has gotten through "a hundred pood" of paper that year (roughly 3,600 pounds – a pood being an old Russian unit of weight, about 16.4 kg). The letter closes with a brief blessing, the signature, and a final, unexplained joke at the expense of the writer Ivan Leontyev, who wrote under the pen name Shcheglov and whom Chekhov addressed elsewhere in the corpus by the nickname "Jean" – here predicting, apropos of nothing in the letter, that he’ll end up becoming a monastic abbot.