The Life of Klim Samgin

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The Life of Klim Samgin

First edition cover (1927)
Author	Maxim Gorky
Original title	Жизнь Клима Самгина
Country	Italy / Germany / Soviet Union
Language	Russian
Genre	Philosophical novel, bildungsroman, modernist novel, historical novel
Publisher	Verlag "Kniga"
Publication date	1927–1931; 1937
Published in English	1930–1938

The Life of Klim Samgin (Russian: Жизнь Клима Самгина, romanized: Zhizn' Klima Samgina) is a four-volume novel written by Maxim Gorky from 1925 up to his death in 1936. It is Gorky's most ambitious work, intended to depict "all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century."^[1] It follows the decline of Russian intelligentsia from the start of the 1870s and the assassination of Alexander II to the 1917 Revolution, seen in the eyes of Klim Samgin, a typical petit-bourgeois intellectual. The fourth and final part is unfinished and abruptly ends with the beginning of the February Revolution, although as seen from Gorky's drafts and fragments, Lenin's return to Russia in April 1917 and Samgin's death may have been intended as the finale.^[2]

In English, the novel was published under the titles Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires and The Specter.

Criticism[]

Despite that Gorky himself thought of the book as a message to future generations (as he said, "the old ones won't like it, while the young ones won't get it") and called it his masterpiece and "his only good book",^[3] critics consider it one of the most controversial books in Russian literature: while some see it only as a typical work of socrealist satire^[4] and criticize it for "two-dimensional" characters, "tediousness"^[5] and for being "overly tendentious", others find it one of the most important works of Russian 20th century literature (some critics see it as a modernist work).^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Reviews[]

Gorky can't distinguish himself from Klim ... because, as we have seen, Gorky agrees with Samgin in many respects. Belief in "humanism", in culture in general, in Romain Rolland, in eccentrics, is intertwined, especially in Gorky's works of recent times, with "objectivism", in which there is also a chill of pessimistic indifference. <...> The Life of Klim Samgin shows that the skeptical Samgin glasses have already had a harmful effect on Gorky's eyes.

— Zh. Elberg, Soviet RAPP critic, 1927

I like Samgin more than The Artamonov Business... However, pondering the reasons for the artistic superiority of Samgin, I find that its merits are directly related to the fact that it is more difficult to read it than The Artamonovs, because when you discuss this thing, you reach for contradictions with interest and hope, so in short, the weight of your thing lies the weight of a thing lies in the fact that its fate and structure are subject to broader and more fundamental laws of the spirit than the indisputable fiction ...

— Boris Pasternak, 1927

The only piece of real literature that has come out of Russia since the Revolution.

— Darthmouth Alumni Magazine, 1930

Bystander is like Well’s Ann Veronica ... Gorki is concerned with the presentation of 'the young intellectual' of before the Revolution, his origins, growth, and development, his milieu, and all the problems which it suggests, just as Ann Veronica is the type outline, not the individual story, of a young woman rebel.

— VQR, 1930

First of all, the novel is unusually heavy, monotonous, confused and... boring. <...> He decided to write this peculiar history of Russian intelligentsia in order to finally renounce it. He invites the proletarian readers of Klim Samgin as if to an art gallery: "Look, that's who has "made the Revolution" - here they are, talkers, dreamers, crooks, little narcissistic Hamlets".

— Georgy Adamovich, Russian émigré critic, 1931

As a revolutionary epic Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin has the dignity of flawed literary monument ... by its incompleteness and shaplesness. But it is the dignity of the work that even it its failure it demands respect, and that dignity is due to the sustaining talkativeness of so many dozens of characters ... so that it literally seems to recreate in its cacophonous way a picture of Russian intellectual history before 1917...

— , 1982

Before us is, first of all, a novel of ideas, saturated with easily readable, deliberate symbols and inheriting in many ways the most polemical texts of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. From The Life of Klim Samgin, among other things, comes the meme "Was there a boy at all?" - and the question of whether such a Samgin was possible is quite pertinent.

— polka.academy, 2018

Style and literary significance[]

The supportive critics appreciate the novel for its laconic, experimental and eclectic style, which combines different cultural traditions and literary styles.^[11] It is also noted that, unlike Gorky's previous works, known for their traditional style of the realist novel, Klim Samgin differs with poetics, close to Russian avant-garde.^[12] Richard Freeborn also finds the novel notable for its polyphony, created by a "multi-faceted, multi-voiced kaleidoscope of social types", by "talkativeness of so many dozens of characters". As he also says, Gorky represents Russian life "as dominated by identity-seekers who create mirror images of each other, who are duplicates or doubles in a fictional replica of history".^[13] By that, Gorky in his last works, and especially in Samgin, is close to Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The Life of Klim Samgin, despite the interpritation of the official Soviet critic as the work of socrealism, is found by some critics in many ways similar to such modernist masterpieces as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943). For example, French critic Philippe Chardin in his study Le roman de la conscience dangereuse analyzes Samgin in the series of nine works, including well-known modernist novels. German scholar Armin Knigge also finds it in many ways similar to modernist novels from Chardin's study, such as Zeno's Conscience (1923), In Search of Lost Time (1913—1927), The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities.^[14] In some studies, such as P. Cioni's and Ralf Schroder's, Gorky's novel is directly defined as a modernist work and a "negative epic", peculiar, according to Schroder, to Mann, Joyce and Proust. Schroder writes: "In Samgin Gorky embodies a specifically modernist theme of contradiction between the post-bourgeois reality and the dogmatic pre-bourgeois picture of the world, and also the resulting modernist destruction of this picture. That's why the ideological and artistic complex of Samgin includes not only a parody of a 19th-century young man's story, but also a negative epic".^[15][16]

Portrayal of the Revolution[]

Bolsheviks are represented by a group of minor characters headed by Stepan Kutuzov. According to the official Soviet criticism, which portrayed Gorky as the "founder of Socialist Realism", Kutuzov is the main positive character, a "bearer of the true scientific views and a propagandist of the great truth of 20th century", and he opposes Samgin's bourgeois individualism. Modern critics think that Gorky's portrayal of Revolution is rather ambivalent, and Kutuzov's positivity is questioned. Richard Freeborn and Alexandra Smith also view Kutuzov as the positive character and the bearer of 'the heroism of a labourer, of a craftsman of revolution', to whom Gorky sympathizes with his attempts to influence the course of history. However, Freeborn denies the positivity of the Revolution itself: "But essential in any estimate of his ambivalent, uncomitted, deeply sceptical view of things is the paradox of the novel as a whole ... As a result, the novel invites scrutiny as an anti-epic, or as an epic of an anti-hero, with an implication that the revolution itself deserves the same sceptical dethronement in terms of life's values and priorities as does the unrevolutionary hero." Some critics question Kutuzov's positivity:

And as I think, the characteristic "vein" of 90s—1900s was not this Samgin's hamletovshchina (was there a boy or not?), and not the abstract and groundless kutuzovshchina, but the stubborn, living, rebellious power that you had portrayed in Mother...

— Fyodor Gladkov

No, no, Gorky did not treat him positively. He had a negative attitude towards him ... After all, he even endows him with such dryness. Here he is a singer, but, on the other hand, he sings without a soul. For him, it's just a form...

— Mikhail Bakhtin

The development of the revolutionary spirit in the novel is opposed not only by the characteristics of revolutionaries, but also by the fact that in the depicted reality they do not represent the leading force of the historical process, but some more or less successfully operating minority.

— Armin Knigge

Kutuzov is unpleasant in the novel, by the way. It's a communist with a strong white muscular body - a boring hero, you can't empathize with him.

— Dmitry Bykov

English translation[]

The first volume was translated as Bystander (1930) by well-known translator , while other 3 were translated by Alexander Bakshy as The Magnet (1931), Other Fires (1933) and The Specter (1938). The whole work was referred as Forty Years: The Life of Clim Samghin and labeled as a "tetralogy of novels". The novel was never republished in English. It was also rarely republished in the Soviet Union.

Despite that the first volume of the novel is divided only into five lengthy chapters and the rest of it takes the form of uninterrupted narrative, it is divided into strict short chapters in Bakshy's translation.

Screen adaptation[]

The novel was turned into the eponymous TV series by in 1988.

References[]

External links[]

Wikisource has the original text of novel: Жизнь Клима Самгина

• Other Fires at the Sikh National Archives of Canada (free PDF scan)
• The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev Pasternak - Richard Freeborn - Google Books (available as free preview)
• Reference Guide to Russian Literature. Edited by Neil Cornwell - Google Books (from the free preview, 1/2)
• Reference Guide to Russian Literature. Edited by Neil Cornwell - Google Books (from the free preview, 2/2)
• Bystander at the Internet Archive