Our Notes & References

The complete and rarer two parts of the Znanie Collection for the year 1903, with many first publications including the first appearance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, as well as Andreev’s, Gorkii’s and Bunin’s contributions in prose and verse.

Here Chekhov neatly sidestepped earlier contractual obligations to the publisher Adolf Marks, who still published a version of the play in book form that introduced a few minor changes to the text later in 1904. Nevertheless, this was the end of Chekhov’s connection with Marks: both playwright and publisher died in 1904. Earlier that year, on January 17th, the play premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre in a production directed by the celebrated Konstantin Stanislavskii.

The volume also includes Kuprin’s Mirnoe Zhitie, Gorkii’s Chelovek and poems and stories by Bunin – in first appearances.

The ‘Znanie’ Society, set up by members of the Literacy Committee under K.P. Piatnitskii in 1898, was reorganised by Gorkii after his first great success, and began releasing these ‘Collections’ in 1904. Lenin wrote that in them Gorkiy himself tried ‘to concentrate the best forces of creative literature.’ In the reactionary atmosphere after the revolutions of 1905, many of its members quit the Society, which had always been inclined towards the revolutionary and contentious, and Gorkii broke off his connection with the publication in 1912 while living abroad.

Provenance

(part two, pp. 29-105)