To A. I. Sumbatov, 13 February 1891. Moscow.
А. И. СУМБАТОВУ (ЮЖИНУ), 13 февраля 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
A brief note of 13 February 1891, from Moscow, to Prince Alexander Ivanovich Sumbatov (stage name Yuzhin; 1857–1927), the actor and playwright at the Maly Theatre and longtime friend already established elsewhere in this corpus. It is a short practical errand rather than a substantive letter: Chekhov asks Sumbatov to hold two theater coupons for him at the usual booth – normally 1 ruble 10 kopecks apiece, implying some discount or house arrangement is in play – promises to carry a contract over to the Directorate (almost certainly the Moscow office of the Imperial Theatres’ Directorate, which oversaw the state stages including the Maly), and thanks Sumbatov for his trouble on some unspecified matter, presumably the same errand.
The envelope annotation preserves the address in the corpus’s standard form for this pair of correspondents: Sumbatov’s princely title ("His Excellency"), his given name and patronymic, his stage surname, and the Moscow address on Leontyevsky Lane at the Sorokoumovskaya house – the same address given, in a different section order, in’s envelope.