To A. S. Lazarev, 13 March 1890. Moscow.

it opens with a salutation ("Dearest Alexander Semyonovich"), runs to several full paragraphs of connected prose, and closes with a conventional valediction and signature ("Yours, A. Chekhov") followed by a brief postscript-like final line. The dateline is given twice in the source (a full "13 марта 1890 г. Москва." as, then a bare "13 марта." repeated as immediately before the body) – this appears to be an editorial artifact of the printed edition (a running dateline plus a repeated day-only line carried over from the manuscript or from segmentation) rather than a sign of two distinct items; the letter proper is entirely continuous from through, addressed throughout to the same correspondent on the same occasion.

The addressee is Alexander Semyonovich Lazarev, who wrote under the pen name "Gruzinsky," a younger writer Chekhov was mentoring in his semi-official role vetting submissions to Suvorin’s newspaper "Novoye Vremya" (New Time). The letter is business-and-craft in one breath. Chekhov reports that he intercepted and discarded Lazarev’s letter to Suvorin himself (tearing off the blank half of the stationery first, in characteristic frugality), and explains the actual channel for collecting a fee: the newspaper’s office at Nevsky 38, not Suvorin personally. He lays out the going flat rate for a young contributor’s first stories – five kopecks a line, with rare exceptions – and tells Lazarev plainly that to earn the higher 7-8-kopeck rate for his story "Побег" ("The Escape"), he needs to build a track record with two or three more stories before submitting a combined bill.

The middle of the letter turns to line-edit craft criticism of "The Escape" itself: Chekhov notes a continuity slip where one character is called by two different names (Anika and Prokhor), needling that his own proofreading missed one instance. He then gives one of his more vivid pieces of craft advice in this stretch of the correspondence – build the sentence, make it "juicier, fattier," using the concrete image of a stick threaded through a smoked whitefish for a sentence that is too thin and plain – and recommends that a story be written over five or six days, each sentence left to sit in the mind before being committed to paper, a discipline he admits he does not follow himself out of laziness but recommends to Lazarev as a younger writer. He closes with news that Nikolai Yezhov (a fellow contributor to New Time) has been visiting, that Yezhov’s wife is ill and his affairs are not flourishing though he keeps his spirits up; a nudge to Lazarev to finish his "Saturday piece" (a recurring newspaper feature) promptly, with a comic image of a lazy townsman reluctant to put his boots on each morning; a conventional closing blessing; the signature; and a final one-line reassurance that Chekhov will write to Khudekov on Lazarev’s behalf.