To A. S. Suvorin, 27 May 1891. Bogimovo.

Written before dawn on 27 May 1891 from Bogimovo, the Kaluga province estate the Chekhov family was renting for the summer, to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, publisher of Novoye Vremya and Chekhov’s closest correspondent. Suvorin had evidently written complaining of being stuck in Petersburg for the summer and reproaching Chekhov for writing nothing for the paper; Chekhov answers with a countryside inventory of small misfortunes (a runaway mongoose, a dead foal), an account of his stalled fiction and the ongoing labor of the Sakhalin book, a rebuttal on the question of declining morals among "girls," and a note on the household’s penny-stakes roulette wheel.

The mongoose Mangus is the animal Chekhov brought back from his Sakhalin journey, a recurring figure in this stretch of correspondence. Neupokoyev was a proofreader or printing-house contact involved in preparing Chekhov’s texts; I. L. Shcheglov (Leontyev) was a fellow writer and frequent correspondent of both men. The Sakhalin book is Ostrov Sakhalin, then still in progress from Chekhov’s 1890 journey. "The Zhitel" was the pen name of A. A. Dyakov, a Novoye Vremya columnist known for moralizing pieces on contemporary manners; Chekhov’s examples – Catherine the Great’s plan to marry off her favorite Alexander Mamonov, Pushkin’s "The Stationmaster," and the young heroines of Shakespeare – are offered against Suvorin’s claim that promiscuity among young women is a new phenomenon. The fourteen lines struck through after are a cut made by an earlier editor of the letters, not by Chekhov. Anna Ivanovna is Suvorin’s wife; Nastya and Borya are among his children.