To A. S. Suvorin, 17 December 1890. Moscow.

it runs across fifteen sections of sustained, varied content – a note on a promised story, gossip about a mutual acquaintance’s inheritance, domestic complaints about the mass of paperwork brought back from Sakhalin, wry remarks on his health, comic theological banter, literary business, and a closing wish for the addressee’s health – with a genuine signature ("Ваш А. Чехов" / "Yours, A. Chekhov.") rather than a bare or comic pseudonym. the addressee (Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin) is constant throughout, the topics run on without any break suggesting a different letter, and the whole is consistent with Chekhov’s habitual letters to Suvorin in this period. Dated 17 December 1890, Moscow.

Chekhov has just returned to Moscow from his journey to Sakhalin (via Siberia overland, then home by sea through the tropics), and this letter finds him newly settled back in, still digesting the trip. He opens by confirming, in answer to an evident telegram exchange, that a promised story is coming, though it needs revision ("long and narrow, like a centipede"). He turns to gossip about the poet Alexei Pleshcheyev’s unexpected two-million-ruble inheritance, mocking the incongruity of the sum with Pleshcheyev’s modest habits. He describes the mountain of statistical cards and papers he has brought back from his Sakhalin census work, wishing half-seriously for a sensible wife to help him sort it rather than burdening his sister Maria. He notes physical complaints – a growing belly, flagging virility, a chill and cough caught after the tropics – in his characteristic wry, self-deprecating register. He then needles Suvorin over an apparent claim (presumably made by or relayed through Suvorin) that the writer Dmitri Grigorovich had once worked as a caretaker in the Sands district of Petersburg, using it as a springboard for a run of comic theological musing on eternity and the kingdom of heaven, tying it back to the fine sunsets he saw in the Bay of Bengal on the voyage home. He reports on Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel (almost certainly "Looking Backward"), which he heard summarized by General Kononovich on Sakhalin and began reading himself, planning to finish it in Petersburg. He asks mockingly when the humorist Nikolai Leikin will be promoted in the civil-service table of ranks, quoting Leikin’s own letters with affectionate contempt for their placid, trivial content (losing weight, turkeys, cabbage). He promises to tell Suvorin everything about the trip in person, reflects that Suvorin had been wrong to counsel him against going to Sakhalin – listing his post-trip ailments and manias half-ironically as proof of how much fuller a man the journey has made him – and remarks that Tolstoy’s "The Kreutzer Sonata," which had felt urgent before the trip, now strikes him as absurd, wondering aloud whether the journey matured him or unhinged him. He describes a new acquaintance, a Dr. Shcherbak, as an admirable, universally liked man with a chaotic past. The letter closes with Chekhov reassuring Suvorin not to worry over his ailments (evidently mentioned in a prior letter from Suvorin) unless they turn out to be typhus or pneumonia, and a warm, genuine sign-off.