To A. S. Lazarev, 21 January 1891. Petersburg.

A short business note written from Petersburg on 21 January 1891 to Alexander Semyonovich Lazarev, a fellow humor-magazine writer and friend who published under the pen name "Gruzinsky". The letter is a single continuous piece of correspondence, one sitting – the doubled dateline (, full form then the abbreviated day-of-month notation) is the same convention seen throughout this edition’s letter headers

3 is the substantive item: Chekhov reports that Lazarev’s story has been accepted for one of the illustrated supplements to "Novoye Vremya" ("New Time"), the Petersburg daily for which Chekhov himself wrote and whose publisher, Alexei Suvorin, is credited here with having cut the story – trimming its longueurs and removing its opening – to good effect. Chekhov flags one point of possible reader confusion: that a grandfather character’s intention to marry his granddaughter off to a man named Osokin may not be clear to every reader. is a brief reminder of a standing favor: Lazarev had apparently offered to send children’s books for the schools on Sakhalin, the island penal colony Chekhov had visited and reported on the previous year. passes along greetings from Viktor Viktorovich Bilibin, another "Oskolki" colleague and frequent presence in Chekhov’s Petersburg-circle letters of this period, and is the signature.