To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 25 December 1891. Moscow.

Written 25 December 1891 from Moscow (Malaya Dmitrovka, the Firgang house) to Alexei Nikolayevich Pleshcheyev (1825–1893), the poet with whom Chekhov corresponded extensively and whose whereabouts he had lost track of – he opens by explaining he only learned Pleshcheyev’s address the day before by chance (cf. the 20 December 1891 letter to Ye. P. Yegorov, written five days earlier, in which Chekhov laments not being able to find Pleshcheyev’s address at all).

Chekhov asks after Pleshcheyev’s health and news, then reports his own: a month and a half of influenza with a lung complication and a severe cough, and plans to go south to Poltava province in March, where his sister has gone to buy a farm, and to stay there until the cough clears. He surveys literary and social life – quiet literary affairs against a noisy public mood, much talk of the famine and the relief work it has generated, empty theaters, mild winter weather, brief notes on Ivan Shcheglov (drawn to the Tolstoyans), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (still absorbed in his lofty spiritual searchings at the Muruzi house), Viktor Fausek’s new master’s degree, and an absurd rumor circulating in Petersburg that Chekhov himself has married a Sibiryakova heiress and taken a five-million-ruble dowry, which he finds baseless and distasteful. He has not seen Alexander Ostrovsky this year; Suvorin is well. He is going to Petersburg the next day on business connected with the farm purchase – to get money from Suvorin’s bookshop and to have a power of attorney drawn up in the name of A. I. Smagin. He sends regards to Pleshcheyev’s family, notes he had heard rumors of Pleshcheyev’s illness in autumn but understands he is now well, and reflects briefly that illness is a kind of bondage. He expects not to see Pleshcheyev again soon, since he will be away in the south from March until at least November and will give up his Moscow apartment, living in Petersburg instead. He closes with a private, delicate clarification: recalling an evening in Paris when Pleshcheyev offered to lend him money and he declined, he worried afterward that the refusal had wounded or angered Pleshcheyev, sensing a coldness at their parting; he now explains, in confidence, that he refused purely out of self-preservation – he was living carelessly in Paris at the time and feared extra money would only harm his health – and assures Pleshcheyev he would have borrowed from him as readily as from Suvorin had he actually been in need.