To A. S. Suvorin, 31 January 1891. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 31 января 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow on 31 January 1891 to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, publisher of Novoye Vremya and Chekhov’s closest correspondent, shortly after Chekhov’s return from a stay with Suvorin in Petersburg. It is a rapid string of short items in Chekhov’s characteristic letter-miscellany manner: a sardonic anecdote about a woman astronomer’s reaction to Suvorin’s greetings and her grief over the mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya’s recent death; a report that his pet mongoose has fallen ill; a long, somber account of the ruin of a Polish family he had known in boyhood in Taganrog; news of his progress on the novella (again The Duel); a mock-Latin scolding of Suvorin’s sons for a prank note left in his coat pocket; a wry note on the slowness of the mail from Sakhalin; and word that he has been cutting stories from a second edition of Motley Stories (Пёстрые рассказы).
4 continues the recurring thread of the mongoose Chekhov brought back from his Sakhalin journey: here it has fallen ill in the Moscow winter, and Chekhov’s brief, rhetorical "And for what?" is uncharacteristically plaintive for so slight a household note.
Kovalevskaya is Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, the mathematician, who died on 29 January 1891, two days before this letter. Borya, Mitya, and Andryusha are Suvorin’s sons. The censor Matveyev and Ivan Pavlovich Kazansky belonged to Suvorin’s circle; Anna Ivanovna is Suvorin’s wife. Feodosia was the Crimean town where the Suvorins kept a summer house.