The Life of Klim Samgin

The Life of Klim Samgin 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." 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 possible ending. The novel received controversial reputation in critic, although later it was described as a notable work of the 20th-century literature. In English, the four volumes were published in 1930s under the titles Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires and The Specter; the whole book was referred as Forty Years: The Life of Clim Samghin, "a tetralogy of novels". Reception and criticism 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 only good book", However, it has a controversial reputation in literary criticism, some judging it a typical work of Socialist realism satire, with its "tediousness" and "two-dimensional" characters, and for being "overly tendentious"; others consider it one of the most important works of Russian 20th century literature (some critics see it as a modernist work). Joseph Stalin was reluctant about the novel. Milovan Djilas cites his words said in 1948: