[1] Vasilyev, a law student, is persuaded by his friends Meyer and Rybnikov to take an evening cruise through the Lane, a red light district in Moscow.

Here, feeling the symptoms of the approaching nervous breakdown, a condition familiar to him, he spends a sleepless night trying to come up with some kind of project to 'save' all those women who apparently fail to see that they have been reduced to the status of animals.

The writer, noted for his sensitivity to social injustice and great compassion for suffering people, died in a hospital five days after he threw himself down the stairwell from the fourth floor of the house he lived in.

The following day, Chekhov sent an enthusiastic reply, promising to "send something for the collection" and noting that such ideas, "beside their direct goal, serve as a uniting force for the writers' community which, even if not numerous, are still disparate.

"[3] On 30 March, Pleshcheyev too asked Chekhov to provide some work for his tribute to Garshin, mentioning the Novosti-related project, in a rather negative light, characterizing it as superficial.

For a time, the hope remained that the two parties would join forces, then the disagreements became obvious and Chekhov in another letter to Pleshcheyev expressed his disappointment with the split.

Probably just one little idea: a young man, a Garshin type, strong personality, honest and deeply sensitive, finds himself in a brothel for the first time in his life.

I describe here the Sobolev Lane with its brothels, but carefully, without wallowing in mud or resorting to strong language," Chekhov assured him on 3 November.

"[6] On 11 November, in a letter to Alexey Suvorin he wrote: "Today I finished the story for the Garshin memorial collection, and that's huge relief... Why don't you ever say anything in your newspaper about prostitution?

Chekhov published by Marks, was banned from public libraries and reading-halls, and "A Nervous Breakdown" was cited among the three short stories deemed politically incorrect.

"[It] sermonizes against prostitution, but at the same time implies that any single man's attempts to fight this evil are doomed to be futile," a member of the Education ministry's Scientific committee Evgraf Kovalevsky explained.

"The literary community, students, Evreyinova, Pleshcheyev, women and others praised my Breakdown to high heavens, but only Grigorovich spotted the first snow episode," wrote Chekhov in his 23 December 1888 letter to Suvorin.

Whether Suvorin replied by letter or not is unknown, but Novoye Vremya, which originally ignored the compilation, responded in its own way, by publishing in January 1889 a negative review,[8] by Viktor Burenin, which outraged Pleshcheyev.

There were two reviews (on 29 December 1888, and 5 January 1889) of the collection in Novosti Dnya (News of the Day), both pointing at "Nervous Breakdown" as its strongest piece.