To A. S. Suvorin, 23 February 1890. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 23 февраля 1890 г. Москва.
Headnote
it opens with an affectionate salutation ("Голубчик" / "My dear fellow"), moves through several distinct topics in full connected prose, and closes with a courtesy formula and full signature ("Ваш А. Чехов" / "Yours, A. Chekhov"). The source reads as a single coherent letter of 23 February 1890 to Aleksey Suvorin, Chekhov’s publisher, editor of Novoye Vremya, and principal correspondent – no sign of concatenated or misfiled items.
Chekhov, writing from Moscow shortly before his departure for Sakhalin (April 1890), works through a run of small business and personal matters typical of his letters to Suvorin. He asks that the play "Свадьба" ("The Wedding") be returned along with some books, sent on by Suvorin’s household by accident, and says it need not be printed; he encloses a wish-list of books to obtain from the writer/critic Konstantin Skalkovsky, and confirms having sent along back issues of the journal Vestnik Yevropy and a book belonging to one Sandrock. He mocks his brother Alexander’s credulous enthusiasm for a missionary speech by an archpriest named Ornatsky on the forced conversion of Siberian native peoples, itemizing the speech’s self-congratulation, its enormous public cost, and its coercive undertone with plain sarcasm ("read: by force"). He thanks Suvorin for a gift or loan of Kruzenshtern (presumably the explorer/navigator Adam Johann von Krusenstern’s writings), jokes about Suvorin’s complaints against old age as covert warmongering ("Let’s go to Abyssinia"), advises against printing an article by the writer Mariya Tsebrikova (dismissing it as argument without facts), asks that the columnist Lyalin be reined in from attacking lawyers, and – in the letter’s most serious passage – urges caution regarding a criminal trial: the acquittal of a woman named Maksimenko in Rostov-on-Don, accused of poisoning her husband, whom Chekhov – having spoken with her defense counsel Kholeva before the trial – believes to be genuinely innocent, a view he says the Rostov public shared (they applauded the verdict). The letter closes with a mock-devout blessing ("May you be kept safe by St. Boniface") and the signature.
No structural or coherence concerns