About the work
Summerfolk (Russian: Dachniki) is a play in four acts by Maxim Gorky, who subtitled it “Scenes”. Gorky made first drafts in 1902 and wrote most of it in 1904; after a reading that spring the Moscow Art Theatre turned the play down, and he went on revising it through the summer. It premiered in November 1904 in Saint Petersburg at the theatre Vera Komissarzhevskaya had founded that same year, with Komissarzhevskaya herself as Varvara. The text appeared in print in 1905 in an anthology from the Znanie publishing house.
Plot
In the summer of 1904 the lawyer Basov and his wife Varvara gather a circle of educated city people at their dacha: the engineer Suslov and his wife Yulia, the doctor Maria Lvovna, Basov's sister Kaleria, who writes poetry, and the writer Shalimov, whom Varvara admires until he turns out to be a weary cynic. The group fills the days with talk, amateur theatricals, picnics and drink, while affairs, boredom and mutual contempt grow underneath and Varvara feels increasingly out of place. When Ryumin, unhappily in love with her, tries to shoot himself, an open quarrel breaks out over the failure of the intelligentsia. Varvara breaks with all of them and leaves her husband.
Cultural significance
The premiere already divided the house between cheers and whistles, and in 1905 performances in Kyiv, Rostov-on-Don and other cities turned into political demonstrations. Gorky took aim at an intelligentsia risen from humble origins that withdraws from social responsibility into a comfortable private life. In German-speaking theatre, Peter Stein's 1974 production at Berlin's Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer became a major success, running for more than 150 performances and reaching cinemas as a film in 1976.