Autumn, the first volume of The Peasants, appeared in Polish in 1902, Winter in 1904, Spring in 1906, and Summer in 1909. They were soon translated into many languages. In 1904, the first volume was translated into Russian. In 1911, Marie-Anne de Bouvet published in Revue de Paris a 60-page adaptation of the first two volumes, entitled "La terre et la femme." In Germany, Eugene Diedrichs published a translation by Jean-Paul d'Arderschah in 1912. A French scholar and admirer of Polish literature, Franck Louis Schoell, translated The Peasants, in two volumes, in 1919, although his full translation was not published by Payot until 1925. In Sweden, the first volume appeared in 1920, translated by Wester, and the remaining three in 1924. The Czech translation of Volume I by Rypacek appeared in 1920, and the Spanish one in 1920. Reymont attracted the attention of literary critics in France and Sweden. Theodore de Wyzewa wrote an article about him in Revue des deux mondes (September 15, 1910) entitled "Un romancier polonais." Schoen, before translating The Peasants, attracted literary circles (and the publisher Payot) to Reymont's work with his article, "Les paysans polonais vus par un de leurs," in Revue de Paris (September 15, 1918). Fredrik Böök, an official consultant to the Nobel Prize Committee, had compared The Peasants with the Iliad in "Essayer och kritiker" (IV, 1918), and was later instrumental in convincing the Swedish Academy to select Reymont for the Nobel Prize in literature, which he was awarded on November 13, 1924. Nor was Reymont unknown to American readers.3 His first short story in English, "The Trial," translated by Else Benecke and Marie Busch, had appeared in New York in 1916. In the same year, an anonymous translation of his story "Twilight" appeared in The Pagan, a magazine for Eudaemonists. A fragment of his novel The Promised Land, entitled "In the Old Town at Lodz," translated by Selver, was published in 1919, in Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse. The Comedienne, a novel translated by Edmund Obecny, was published by Putnam in 1920. And a short story, "A Polish Scene," was translated in 1921 by Solomon and included, together with "Death," in Selected Polish Tales. In October of 1919, in Warsaw, G. B. Putnam signed a contract with Reymont that gave him exclusive rights to publish the author's books in America and England. In 1920, Putnam selected MichaI Dziewicki, from Krakow, as translator of The Peasants. At the beginning of 1922, Dziewicki sent Putnam two volumes of the novel translated into English. Reymont, in a letter of February 18, 1922 to Wojciech Morawski, his friend and literary agent in New York, wrote, "Mr. Dziewicki wrote to me a week ago that he had finished the translation of The Peasants. The first two volumes are reportedly already at Putnam's, but the last two he is sending by courier as he is afraid to trust them to the postal service" (Orłowski 110). Putnam, however, not ready to risk the publication of four volumes, was delaying. Meanwhile, a Polish scholar, Roman Dyboski, translated "The Polish Peasants," two fragments of the novel, and published them in The Slavonic Review (the first fragment in December 1922, the second in March 1923). The first fragment was reprinted in The Living Age (February 1923), the second in Poland (June 1923). Another fragment from The Peasants, translated by Źółtowska, was published in The Slavonic Review of June 1923 and reprinted in Poland (October 1924). In 1923, Putnam gave up the idea of publishing The Peasants, and Dziewicki's translation was taken by Alfred A. Knopf, who employed Morawski as editor. On December 7, 1923, Reymont sent the signed contract with Knopf to New York, and Morawski gave a lecture on Reymont at Columbia University at about the same time. On March 14, 1924, Morawski wrote to Reymont that Volume I of The Peasants was "doing well." According to figures supplied by Knopf, the first volume sold 30,000 copies, the second 23,000, the third 20,000, and the fourth 20,000 (Orłowski 47). What is more important, the first volume was available in bookstores and already selling well in the middle of March 1924. Reymont himself spent the summers of 1919 and 1920 in the United States. Leon Orłowski describes the first of those visits: "In New York, Morawski would take Reymont to breakfast at Lotos, a literary club he belonged to, where he introduced him to American journalists and writers. At night he would take him home to dinner or they would go out, usually with someone who could be helpful in their publishing plans, already in embryo" (Orłowski 15). During Reymont's stay in New York, he met Rupert Hughes, who wrote several articles about him for American periodicals. Hughes was the first to introduce the Polish writer to American readers with his article in The New York Times Magazine (July 13, 1919), entitled "Poland's Peasant Novelist." Another critic, Joseph Wood Krutch, praised the "literary architecture" of The Peasants in his review of the first two volumes, "Earth's Diurnal Course," in The Nation on January 21, 1925.