Events
- January 31 – Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (Три сeстры, Tri sestry) opens at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko with Stanislavski as Vershinin, Olga Knipper as Masha, Margarita Savetskaya as Olga, Maria Andreyeva as Irina, and Maria Lilina (Stanislavsky's wife) as Natasha.
- February 22 – Leo Tolstoy is excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.[1]
- May 1 – Publication of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee in Belgium.[2]
- May 6 – Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, 52, marries his third wife, the Swedish-Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse, 23, after an engagement in March during rehearsals for his play Easter (Påsk).
- May 25 – Chekhov marries Olga Knipper in a quiet ceremony.[3]
- May 28 – Cherry v. Des Moines Leader is decided in the Iowa Supreme Court, upholding the right to publish critical reviews.
- June 28 – G. K. Chesterton marries Frances Blogg at St Mary Abbots, Kensington.
- July – The first modern performances of Everyman, the 15th-century morality play, are given by William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society outdoors at the Charterhouse in London.[4][5]
- July 24 – O. Henry is released from prison in Columbus, Ohio after serving three years for embezzlement.
- October
- Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, is published in Berlin.
- The Irish Literary Theatre project gives its final performance.[6]
- October 23 – Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate of literature from Yale University. In the same month he moves to Riverdale, New York.
- December 2 – The Romanian literary review Sămănătorul is founded.[7]
- December 10 – The first Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, to French poet Sully Prudhomme.[8]
- unknown date – World's Classics series of publications is founded by Grant Richards in England.