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Biographical note
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868–1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gorky's works include: The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913–1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). Stephen Mulrine (1937–2020) was a Glasgow-born poet and playwright who wrote extensively for radio and television, and published many translations, including English translations of plays in Russian by Chekhov, Gogol and Gorky, as well as translations of plays by Ibsen, Molière, Pirandello, Strindberg and others.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.
Gorky's magnificent play about the Russian bourgeois social class and the changes occurring around them in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. In the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series.