"[3] In July of the same year Maxim Gorky approached Bunin, suggesting that the latter should take part in a literary Chekhov memorial, a charitable almanac, initiated in Moscow by Aleksander Kuprin and Konstantin Pyatnitsky.

We are to show Chekhov without glamour, pure and clear, sweet and clever man," Gorky wrote Bunin in an 11 July 1904 letter.

[1][4] In October 1904 Bunin completed his essay called "In Memory of Chekhov" and delivered it at the Lovers of Russian Literature Society's special meeting.

On January 17, 1910, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko invited Bunin to read his memoirs at the Moscow Art Theatre where Chekhov's 50th birthday was commemorated.

A year later, preparing his first The Complete series, he combined all the pieces and removed all the strong (and now irrelevant) statements concerning social and cultural issues of the early 1900s Russia.

Two decades later, compiling his The Complete Bunin edition for the Petropolis publishing house in Berlin, he revised the essay again and renamed it as Chekhov.

On May 10, 1911, she wrote to Pyotr Bykov: "You've asked for my opinion as to who might write my late brother's biography and, as you may remember I recommended Ivan Al. Bunin.

In fact, later in Paris, upon rereading his early essay, Bunin inscribed on the copy of the 3rd Znanye book: "Written hastily and, occasionally in a wrong way: it was Maria Pavlovna with her narrow-minded prudery that misled me".

Ten years later, in a heavily censored version, it was included into the Volume IX of the Soviet Complete Bunin (1965) with the following explanation in the commentaries: "The specifics of this work is such that it's overloaded with quotations from contemporaries' memoirs (Avilova, Tikhonov and others), Chekhov's letters and shorts stories.