Chekhov took an interest in Merezhkovskii after the latter wrote an extensive article on the writer in the November 1888 issue of The Northern Herald (Severnyi Vestnik). In his letter to Suvorin of 3 November, Chekhov, providing a detailed analysis of the article (unprecedented in Chekhov's letters), expressed a series of problems he had with the author. The main one was a disagreement on the point that problems of creativity cannot be reduced to the laws of nature:

There were other charges too – that Merezhkovskii finds ‘failures’ amongst Chekhov's heroes, and thus follows the well-trodden path: ‘It's time to abandon failures, superfluous people and to invent something of one's own’.

However, Chekhov assessed the article on the whole – indeed one of the best in the early Chekhoviana – as ‘quite a pleasant thing’.

Chekhov also liked the author himself. ‘Twice the poet Merezhkovskii visited me’, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin on 5 January 1891; ‘he is a very clever person’.