Events
- January
- Mark Twain begins dictating his Autobiography.
- The first issue of Süddeutsche Monatshefte is published in Munich by Paul Nikolaus Cossmann.
- January 17 – Anton Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard («Вишнëвый сад», Vishnevyi sad), opens at the Moscow Art Theatre directed by Constantin Stanislavski.
- February 25 – J. M. Synge's tragedy Riders to the Sea is first performed at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theatre Society.
- March 1 – Sophie Radford de Meissner's translation of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's 1863 historical drama Ivan the Terrible is first played at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Broadway, New York City, by Richard Mansfield.[1]
- April 24 – A Lithuanian press ban in the Russian Empire is lifted. Petras Vileišis installs a printing press in his Vileišis Palace in Vilnius.
- April 25 – Herbert Beerbohm Tree establishes what will become the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, at His Majesty's Theatre in the London's Haymarket.[2]
- May 10 – Virginia Woolf suffers a mental breakdown after the death on February 22 of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen.
- June 16 – The original "Bloomsday", the day James Joyce first walks out with his future wife Nora Barnacle (a chambermaid he first met on June 10), to the Dublin suburb of Ringsend. He sets the action of his novel Ulysses (1922) on this date.[3]
- June 28 – Chekhov, suffering from tuberculosis at Badenweiler, writes to his sister Masha saying his health is improving.[4] He dies just over two weeks later.
- September – Mark Twain buys a home at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
- November 1
- George Bernard Shaw's comedy about Ireland, John Bull's Other Island, opens at the Royal Court Theatre, London, under the management of Harley Granville-Barker after W. B. Yeats rejects it for Dublin's Abbey Theatre.
- The Stephen family have moved to a home at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, where Virginia Woolf joins them about November 8.[5] Here the Bloomsbury Group will form.
- November – Hall Caine's novel The Prodigal Son is published by Heinemann in London and opens in a dramatic adaptation at the Grand Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man.
- December – The only known surviving copy of the first quarto edition of Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus (published in London, 1594) is discovered in Sweden.
- December 21 – The first of Virginia Woolf's published writings, "Haworth, November 1904", an account of a visit to the Brontë family home, appears anonymously in a women's supplement to a clerical journal, The Guardian.[6][7] (A book review written later has appeared in the same journal a week earlier.)[8]
- December 24 – The Coliseum Theatre in London opens.[9]
- December 27
- The Irish National Theatre Society (Abbey Theatre) opens to the public in Dublin. The bill consists of three one-act plays: On Baile's Strand and Cathleen Ní Houlihan by Yeats (the latter with Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh in the title rôle), and Spreading the News by Lady Gregory.
- J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up premières at the Duke of York's Theatre in London[9] with Nina Boucicault in the title rôle and Gerald du Maurier as Captain Hook and Mr Darling; du Maurier is the uncle of the Llewellyn Davies boys, who inspired the story.
- unknown dates
- Probably early this year, Kenneth Grahame begins telling the bedtime stories to his son that are the origin of The Wind in the Willows.[10]
- Alexander Blok's poetry cycle Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses to the Beautiful Lady), written to his new wife, ushers in the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.
- Seven-year-old Wasif Jawhariyyeh begins keeping diaries, later acclaimed as masterpieces of modern Arabic and Jerusalem literature.[11]
- The Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom (Les 120 journées de Sodome), written in 1785, is first published, by the Berlin sexologist Dr. Iwan Bloch (as Dr. Eugen Dühren).
- Translations of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace into English by Constance Garnett and by Leo Wiener are published.