To F. A. Chervinsky, 2 July 1891. Bogimovo.

A short, chatty note of 2 July 1891 from Bogimovo, the Kaluga province estate where the Chekhov family was summering, to the writer Flegont Alekseyevich Chervinsky: dateline, a one-line repeated dateline, a puzzled passage about misdirected mail, a swipe at the critic Skabichevsky, a request for an offprint of Chervinsky’s play, a query about journal editors, a closing, and signature.

Chekhov is baffled that Chervinsky’s letter (and even official Sakhalin-census correspondence) keeps being sent to Taganrog, a town he left six years earlier; he gives his real address near Aleksin. He then dismisses the critic Aleksandr Skabichevsky and critics like him as parasites who comment on other people’s work without improving it – his own trade compared, via a two-line vignette, to a bootmaker and a joiner being publicly praised or damned by passersby who make nothing themselves – and waves off news that Chervinsky has been attacked in print as a good sign. He asks where Chervinsky’s play was published and requests a copy, then asks if Chervinsky knows who edits two legal-affairs periodicals, closing with a brief well-wish and signature.