To A. S. Suvorin, 20 February 1890. Moscow.

it runs across sixteen sections of sustained, varied content – literary business, gossip about mutual acquaintances, complaints about the tedium of preparing for Sakhalin, jokes, a comic pseudonymous signature, and a closing quip about the addressee’s horses – with none of the terse, bare-signature compression that marks a telegram in this corpus. the addressee (Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, publisher of *Novoye Vremya* and Chekhov’s regular correspondent and creditor in this period) is constant throughout, the topics run on without any break suggesting a different letter, and it ends with a conventional closing formula ("With respect,") followed by a joke signature and a genuine postscript-style final line, all consistent with Chekhov’s habitual letters to Suvorin. Dated around 20 February 1890 from Moscow.

Chekhov is in Moscow finishing his preparatory reading before the Sakhalin journey (he would depart in April), and is impatient with the geologist/meteorologist/ethnographer cramming the trip demands of him. He handles a string of small business and social items: thanking Suvorin for tracking down Krusenstern’s atlas (wanted precisely because its map is poor, useful for his own corrective work), needling Suvorin about a half-remembered joke made at his own expense in a letter to Pleshcheyev (a mock self-accusation of drunkenness, followed by real self-mockery about his drinking in Petersburg and comparisons to his idler friends), and relaying miscellaneous gossip – Mme Lenskaya’s beauty regimen, Mamyshev’s misdirected collar, a request for a book from Suvorin’s library. A longer passage concerns Ostrovsky’s visit on behalf of his sister’s book (format and illustration disputes with Suvorin and Neupokoyev), including Chekhov’s vivid disgust at Ostrovsky’s cigars and a note that Ostrovsky’s brother, a government minister, has fallen ill with diabetes. Chekhov notes the local success of Tolstoy’s "The Kreutzer Sonata," chides Suvorin for not sending stories, and reports that his protege Yezhov is effusively, comically grateful for a raise. He jokes bleakly about padding his forthcoming Sakhalin book with borrowed material passed off as his own ("such a learned son of a bitch"), passes on an instruction for someone named Alexey Alexeyevich to travel to the Murgab river, mocks a play by the Romanian queen (Carmen Sylva) that he would like to hiss, and notes vague theater gossip about a play by Maslov. The letter closes with a blessing, the comic mock-formal signature "Heinrich Block \& Co." (a running joke pseudonym, not Chekhov’s real name), and a final aside asking after Suvorin’s horses.