To A. S. Suvorin, 19 December 1891. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 19 декабря 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
A short, business-and-banter note to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, written from Moscow just before the new year. Chekhov opens with a small domestic grievance: a letter he had sent to Suvorin’s son, Aleksei Alekseyevich Suvorin, arrived opened – by the father, not the son – along with two enclosed proofs. Chekhov turns this into a running joke about the unreliability of the post, half-seriously suspecting that letters are being tampered with in transit, since correspondence in both directions has been going astray.
The middle of the letter answers what must have been a query from Suvorin about a "Morozova" soliciting or refusing charitable donations – one of the prominent Morozov merchant family, though Chekhov is careful to distinguish the Varvara Alekseyevna Morozova he knows personally from another Morozova he has only heard about, deferring the details to their next meeting. The one-line mention of "the astronomer lady" being in Petersburg is a bare aside without further context in the letter itself.
The closing return to Aleksei Alekseyevich turns the letter’s opening grievance into a punchline: the reply Chekhov actually sent, and which Suvorin intercepted, was signed as a joke – Aleksei Alekseyevich had signed his own letter "K. Pobedonostsev," invoking Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod and the era’s most powerful reactionary churchman, and Chekhov’s answering signature, "Sabler," tops the joke by invoking Vladimir Karlovich Sabler, Pobedonostsev’s own deputy at the Synod – a small piece of household mock-solemnity in which father and son are cast as instruments of church authority hunting down each other’s mail.