To A. I. Smagin, 14 January 1892. Moscow.

A short, eight-section letter, dated 14 January 1892, from Moscow, to Alexander Ivanovich Smagin – the same Poltava-province landowner and family friend addressed throughout the companion run of letters from 1891-92, through whom the Chekhov family was pursuing purchase of a small country property (the "khutor") in the south.

Content: Chekhov explains that Bely, a Sakhalin district chief, had once asked him during his Sakhalin journey where he might buy a khutor, and that Chekhov had recommended the Yatsenko khutor – the only one he knew of – a recommendation whose consequences have now come to light. He reports the family’s continuing gloom over the stalled property search: Smagin has proposed a khutor near Sumy belonging to Kublitsky, but Ivanenko, writing for the Lintvaryov family, urges against it as damp and inconvenient; a promising small estate they had their eye on was sold out from under them within a day. Chekhov predicts they will only alarm and amuse people while remaining stuck in Moscow. He then reports he is leaving that day for Nizhny Novgorod in twenty-two degrees of frost, traveling by post-horses along the Kazan road, and asks Smagin to write to him in Moscow before the 20th. He teases Smagin about the actress Leshkovskaya and urges him to visit Moscow, ideally in March. He signs off, then adds a postscript that he is giving away his pet mongoose to the Moscow Zoological Garden because it bites.

Tone: brisk and wry throughout – an anecdote about an old piece of advice on Sakhalin finally bearing fruit, resigned comic gloom over the failed khutor hunt, brief practical travel notes, an affectionate tease about Leshkovskaya and an invitation to visit, and a droll closing postscript about the biting mongoose, consistent with the light, businesslike-but-warm register of the rest of the Smagin correspondence.