To A. S. Suvorin, 21 June 1890. Amur pod Pokrovskoy, parokhod "Ermak".

1 Letter to Aleksey Sergeyevich Suvorin, 21 June 1890, written aboard the steamer "Yermak" on the Amur River below the village of Pokrovskaya. This is travel correspondence from Chekhov’s journey across Siberia toward Sakhalin Island, undertaken to conduct the census and survey of the penal colony that would become Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin). By late June 1890 Chekhov had left the overland stage of the route and was descending the Amur by steamer toward the Pacific coast and Sakhalin; he would reach the island in early July 1890. Suvorin, publisher of Novoye vremya and Chekhov’s principal correspondent and sometime patron during this period, was the recipient of most of Chekhov’s Siberian travel letters.

2 Content: a very short note, evidently dashed off despite difficult writing conditions. Chekhov reports that the steamer’s vibration ("shakes as if in a fever") makes writing nearly impossible, so his hopes for using the river passage productively (presumably to write, given the volume of correspondence and notes he was producing on this trip) have come to nothing; he says there is now nothing to do but sleep and eat. He mentions having sent Suvorin a telegram the previous day from Gorbitsa (a settlement on the Shilka River, upstream on the route Chekhov had just traveled before joining the Amur). The letter closes with a brief "Greetings" and his signature, followed by a repeated date line and, on the reverse of the letter/envelope, the postal address: Feodosia, Taurida province, addressed to Aleksey Sergeyevich Suvorin. Suvorin was in Feodosia (Crimea) at the time.

6 Item type: letter (with an appended telegram reference, not itself a telegram). Source; no published English translation was consulted.