Events
- January 21 – The French actress Sarah Bernhardt, having taken over management of the Paris theatre she renames the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, opens it in the title rôle of Victorien Sardou's La Tosca . On May 20 she premières an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet , with herself in the title rôle.
- March 20 – W. H. Davies, "tramp-poet", loses his foot trying to jump on a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario. [1]
- April – Karl Kraus establishes the radical periodical Die Fackel (The Torch) in Vienna.
- April–June – Rainer Maria Rilke, still an art student at the time, travels to Moscow to meet Leo Tolstoy.
- May–December – The only work of fiction by the British politician Winston Churchill, Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania , is serialised in Macmillan's Magazine . [2]
- May – Jack London's first published work, the short story "A Thousand Deaths", appears in The Black Cat ; its acceptance convinces London that he can make a living from literature. [3] [4]
- May 8 – The Irish Literary Theatre, founded by W. B. Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory, George Moore and Edward Martyn, puts on its first production in Dublin, a version of Yeats' verse drama The Countess Cathleen .
- June 20 – The English writer Edward Thomas, an Oxford undergraduate at this time, marries Helen Noble at Fulham register office.
- July 31 – Arthur Machen's wife Amy dies after a long illness, an event that has a devastating effect on him. [5]
- September 1 – The National Theatre in Norway opens with pieces by Holberg and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's 1862 trilogy Sigurd Slembe .
- September – The British Mutoscope and Biograph Company's King John (a very short silent film starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree) becomes the first known film based on a Shakespeare play.
- November – The oldest surviving Japanese film, Momijigari , is shot by Tsunekichi Shibata in Tokyo. It records the kabuki actors Onoe Kikugorō V and Ichikawa Danjūrō IX performing a scene from the play Momijigari .
- November 6 – William Gillette's play Sherlock Holmes , based (with authorisation) on the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, opens in New York City with himself in the title rôle.
- November 7 (October 26 Old Style) – Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya , a reworking of his The Wood Demon (1889), receives its Russian metropolitan première at the Moscow Art Theatre, with Konstantin Stanislavski directing and playing the rôle of Astrov, and Olga Knipper as Yeléna.
- November 18 – Leo Tolstoy completes his last novel, Resurrection («Воскресение», Voskreseniye), published serially in Niva . [6]
- December 12 – Herbert Putnam is appointed Librarian of Congress in the United States, where he will introduce in practice the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) scheme.
- December – The imprisoned William Sydney Porter's pseudonym O. Henry first appears over the short story "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" in this month's McClure's Magazine .
- unknown dates
- Curtis Brown (literary agents) is established in London by the American Albert Curtis Brown.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs begins a brief spell working in his father's battery business.
- Simon Pokagon's O-gi-maw-kwe Mit-I-gwa-ki (Queen of the Woods) is published, the first novel both by and about Native Americans in the United States. [7]
- Lin Shu's first translation into Chinese from a Western text, The Lady of the Camellias , is published as 巴黎茶花女遺事.
- The first series of the Arden Shakespeare under the general editorship of W. J. Craig begins publication by Methuen in London with an edition of Hamlet edited by Edward Dowden.
- The Bulgarian language is officially codified. [8]
