To A. S. Suvorin, 28 May 1890. Krasnoyarsk.

Written three weeks into Chekhov’s overland journey across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, a trip he had begun in late April 1890 and would not complete until early July. Krasnoyarsk, on the Yenisei, was roughly the journey’s midpoint by that stage – well past the Urals, still weeks from Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, the addressee, was the wealthy publisher of *Novoye vremya* and Chekhov’s closest correspondent and confidant of these years; Chekhov wrote him a long, detailed travel letter from nearly every stop, and this brief note reads as a placeholder between two of them – a signal that he is alive and moving, sent to catch the mail before leaving town, with the substantial account already dispatched separately from Tomsk.

The letter is logistical rather than descriptive: it gives Suvorin a telegraph address for reaching him further down the road (poste restante in Blagoveshchensk, far ahead on the Amur), and reports briefly on road conditions – axle-breaking mud so bad that for most of the trip he says he has been "crawling" rather than driving, with his carriage twice breaking down and the repairs costing him time at relay stations. He notes conditions have improved near Krasnoyarsk itself. The tone is terse and practical, in keeping with a note dashed off to make a mail pickup, not a set-piece travel account (those went into the longer letters and the *Ostrov Sakhalin*/"Iz Sibiri" material Chekhov was already assembling from this trip).