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.

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. Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works were 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). He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs.