Originally, besides several poems, another story was planned for the inclusion into the Book I, called "In Corns" (В хлебах; later re-titled and now known as "The Distant Things", Далёкое).
Having failed to finish it in time, in a December 11, 1903, letter Bunin informed Maxim Gorky and Konstantin Pyatnitsky: "I send you the story, but it is not the one that's been promised.
The story "embraced the huge scope of [Russia]'s rural world, being in its approach much wider than his previous works and much more exquisite in form," he argued.
[4] One of the story's harshest critics was Vladimir Korolenko who, writing for Russkoye Bogatstvo, described it as "a set of lightweight vignettes concerned mostly with pictures of nature, full of emotional laments for things of long forgotten past."
"[1] Not long before his death in 1953, revising the text for the Loopy Ears collection (published posthumously in New York City in 1954), Bunin provided the following commentary: "The 'Dreams' novella was written in the end of 1903 – half a century ago!
II commentaries) that Checkov's words were slightly misquoted by Bunin, since in the letter to Amfiteatrov he wrote of "the brilliant 'Black Earth' story", not "Dreams" (which was originally only part of it), as the author seemed to imply.