Dated as "1900-1930" in The Complete Bunin (Petropolis, Berlin, 1935; Moscow, 1965), it was first published in the 1901 No.7 (July) issue of Saint Petersburg magazine Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh (Journal For Everyone), originally under the title "Skete" (Скит).
While working upon the Primal Love (Начальная любовь) compilation, Bunin changed the story's title into "Meliton" (after its main character's first name).
[1] Upon receiving the text, the magazine's editor Viktor Mirolyubov wrote in a letter dated May 29, 1901: "Thank you very much, dear Ivan Alekseevich, for "Skete".
Modern researchers (Oleg Mikhailov among them) point to the fact that in emigration, while preparing his earlier works for new publications, he was cutting off fragments dealing with political and social context of the times those stories were written in, aiming apparently at erasing the 'period' aspect of them and going for more universal, time-unrelated appeal.
In 1930 Bunin extracted from the story half a page of the original text, relating to the young protagonist's telling how he went abroad trying to evade this horrible thing, the Russian autumn: "Only occasionally did Russia came back to my mind and in those moments it seemed such a remote, out of the way place, that I was imagining Gostomysl, drevlyane, tatarschina... How dark and wet autumn is there!"