To V. O. Kononovich, 27 February 1891. Moscow.

A short business note to Vladimir Osipovich Kononovich, the major-general who headed Sakhalin’s penal administration, written eight days after the long letter of 19 February 1891. Chekhov forwards a letter from the secretary of the Petersburg Literacy Committee and confirms that the Volunteer Fleet will carry the promised books to the island free of charge – tidying up the loose ends of the school-supplies commission he had taken on himself after his return from Sakhalin.

The rest is Moscow gossip, offered because he otherwise has "no news at all": the poet Alexei Pleshcheyev’s sudden inheritance, the lawyer Fyodor Plevako’s fees (reckoned with a lawyer’s own dry arithmetic, 1,250 rubles per year of another man’s hard labor), the writer Gleb Uspensky’s dangerous illness, and the total collapse in Russia of Koch’s tuberculin cure, which had briefly been hailed abroad as a cure for tuberculosis. Of Sakhalin itself Chekhov says only that he has not yet published a line and will not until his book is written – a line that gives the letter’s ironic borrowing of the island’s own official phrase for "all quiet" its edge. He closes with a note from Kamorsky, an official organizing a railway battalion of convict labor for the Siberian railway, on the wages such convicts will earn.