To A. S. Suvorin, 22 March 1890. Moscow.

it has a proper dateline, a sustained multi-topic body running to eighteen sections, embedded reported dialogue (an anecdote related at second hand), and a full closing signature ("Votre A. Chekhov"). ’s "22 Marchtember" ("22 мартабря" in the source, a nonce blend of март and [сент/октт]ября) is Chekhov’s own joke at his own expense – a mock correction/elaboration of the dateline in, not a scribal error and not a sign the source is composite.

Written from Moscow to Aleksei Suvorin, Chekhov’s publisher, editor of "Novoye Vremya," and principal correspondent of these years. The letter moves through several distinct threads in Chekhov’s characteristic epistolary manner (business, then grievance, then anecdote, then social reportage, then a return to the personal exchange with Suvorin, then throwaway family jokes): a bookshop/book-errand note (Fischer, "Vestnik Yevropy," Golitsynsky, a request for Voyeikov’s "Climates of Various Countries" and Maximov’s "Siberia and Penal Servitude"); news, via Pleshcheyev, of the collapse of "Severny Vestnik" and Chekhov’s bitter first-person accounting of what the journal’s failure cost him financially, on the eve of his departure for Sakhalin ("my Sakhalin shares" – a bitter pun on his own upcoming journey, not a literal investment); a lengthy secondhand anecdote (via Professor Storozhenko) about Tolstoy’s "The Kreutzer Sonata" angering the Tsar, the suppressed essay "Nicholas the Stick" being shown to him to discredit Tolstoy further, and Tolstoy’s dry, defiant refusals when summoned by Prince Dolgorukov’s aide-de-camp; reportage of two current "trends" in Moscow – routinized corporal punishment at police stations (with an explicit kopeck tariff by social class, extended even to women and, on one occasion, to two junior lawyers) and cabmen’s sympathetic reading of the student disturbances, including an episode of a crowd trying to free arrested students from gendarmes near Strastnoy Monastery; a return exchange with Suvorin about mistrustfulness/self-doubt in artists, distinguishing ordinary authorial self-doubt (which Chekhov says he approves of) from the different, uglier suspicion of others’ motives that he had apparently accused Suvorin of in an earlier letter; and closing with two short, deliberately throwaway family jokes (an uncle’s sanctimoniousness; regards to a "duck," presumably a pet or a family in-joke) before the plain sign-off "Nothing new" and the signature.