To A. S. Suvorin, 5 January 1891. Moscow.

Written from Moscow on 5 January 1891 to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, the publisher of Novoye Vremya and Chekhov’s closest correspondent and confidant through these years. It opens with New Year’s greetings and looks ahead to a visit: Chekhov did travel to St. Petersburg that January and stayed with Suvorin, as promised here.

Chekhov had returned to Moscow in December 1890 from his months-long journey to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island and the long sea voyage home by way of Ceylon, Singapore, and the Suez Canal; the "novella" he is racing to finish for lack of money is generally identified with The Duel, on which he was at work that winter. The bout of "power outages" (perevoi) and his brother Ivan’s bout of typhus reflect the disordered state of the household over the holidays, and his irritation with "petty-bourgeois" Moscow life is a recurring note in the letters written just after Sakhalin.

Viktor Burenin and Sergei Andrievsky were both regular contributors to Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya circle – Burenin as its combative literary critic, Andrievsky as a lawyer and poet. Dmitry Merezhkovsky, then a young poet not yet associated with the Symbolist movement he would later help found, and the minor writer Viktor Bibikov both appear here simply as recent visitors. Feodosia was the Crimean town where Suvorin kept a house. The mongoose was a live souvenir Chekhov had brought back with him from the Sakhalin voyage, mentioned with evident fondness in several letters from this period.