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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.
Stephen Mulrine
Translated by
Born Glasgow, 1937, married with three children, lecturer in History of Art at Glasgow School of Art. Freelance writer, broadcaster and translator. Literary output includes poetry, short stories and criticism, also several original plays for television, and some ninety plus hours of radio drama, serials, adaptations and original plays. His adaptation of Yerofeev's 'Moscow Stations', published by Oberon Books, has been staged in Edinburgh, London and New York. Since the late 1980's has concentrated on translation from Russian.
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