To A. S. Suvorin, 17 February 1890. Moscow.

Written 17 February 1890 from Moscow to Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, the newspaper and publishing magnate (Novoye Vremya) who was by this date Chekhov’s closest correspondent, patron, and de facto editor. The letter falls in the run-up to Chekhov’s departure for Sakhalin: he set out in April 1890 on the journey across Siberia to survey the penal colony, and this letter’s restlessness – “I’m vexed that I’m still not off to Sakhalin” – is part of that lead-up. it opens with a mock-businesslike numbered list, closes with a signed valediction (“Yours, A. Chekhov”), and moves through several unrelated items in full sentences, none of the telegraphic compression or bare-signature terseness that marks the corpus’s actual telegrams.

Content, in order: (1) a numbered run of small errands and transactions typical of the Chekhov-Suvorin correspondence – Kurepin taking on a “prison book” (almost certainly matter connected to Chekhov’s own still-forming Sakhalin project, given the timing), a writer named Filippov wanting his “Dnieper tale” manuscript back for revision before a spring printing, a set of borrowed periodicals and books being returned via one Bogdanov, a sent fur/coat collar with a jokey “guarantee for 35 years” and a query about leftover change, and a request for Suvorin’s help tracking down a list of books, capped by the folk-flavored line “these are only the flowers – the berries will come soon” (i.e., more/bigger asks to follow). (2) A personal turn: boredom and spring restlessness now that Suvorin has left Moscow, and open impatience to be underway for Sakhalin, imagining himself instead on a river steamboat or crossing the steppe by tarantass (a light three-horse open carriage). (3) Literary gossip relayed via the poet Alexei Pleshcheyev – Petersburg friends supposedly annoyed that Chekhov has been avoiding them, Chekhov’s droll “Let them be cross!”, and a report on the actor Pavel Svobodin’s visits, his enthusiasm for the recent German Reichstag elections, and his literary devotion – with the pointed aside that Svobodin said “not half a word about Lessing,” i.e. did not raise (or avoided) some expected topic connected to the German playwright/critic Lessing. (4) A closing boast, delivered deadpan, that all Moscow now knows he dined at the celebrated actress Maria Yermolova’s, so that his social “stock” has risen. (5) A sign-off promising a separate letter to Suvorin’s wife, Anna Ivanovna, with regards to all.