Maxim Gorky

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Maxim Gorky's magnificent response to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, written in 1904, the year Chekhov died. Summerfolk is a play about the Russian bourgeois social class and the changes occurring around them in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. It is set in a world of 'false hopes and unfulfilled promises', where dachas have been subdivided into summer colonies and the newly rich idle away their time in unhappy romantic alliances. Gorky's characters are still dreaming of a better life, but they are increasingly aware of impending revolution. Gorky's play premiered in November 1904 at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in Saint Petersburg. This English version, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine.

CONTENTS: Fragments of Recollections, Maxim Gorky, To Chekhov's Memory, Alexander Kuprin, A. P. Chekhov, Ivan A. Bunin

This is a centennial edition containing some of the best pages from memoirs and essays on Chekhov. Included in the volume are a well-known literary portrait by Maxim Gorky, reminiscences of Chekhov's last years by the writer's wife, the late actress Olga Knipper-Chekhova, as well as new essays by Professor V. Yermilov, an authority on Chekhov, and Kornei Chukovsky, a popular Soviet writer.

Four key new translations of plays (including three previously unpublished works) written at the turn of the 20th century, charting the descent of Russia into revolution Hailed by Chekhov as the voice of his time, Gorky's four plays offer a panoramic view of Russia in the throes of revolution. THE ZYKOVS is set shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Antipa Zykov is a merchant adventurer. His young wife, Pavla is an unworldly convent-bred girl, too weak to realise these ideals in her stormy marriage. EGOR BULYCHOV is set on the eve of revolution as the rich businessman of the title is given power, after the Tsar's abdication. But the songs of the demonstrating crowds outside his window show that his days are numbered. Subtitled 'The Mother' and hugely controversial at the time of its first production VASSA ZHELEZNOVA, is a tragic portrait of a woman with an iron will determined to root out the corruption in her family in order to keep control of the family business. Written during his most religious phase, THE LAST ONES is about a corrupt police chief and his family who face death at the hands of revolutionaries as he tries to fight back by lynching a young man.