Klim Samghin's life

Gorky spoke about the concept of the work “The Life of Klim Samgin” in 1931 at a meeting of the editorial board of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions Publishing House:

I started this book a long time ago, after the first revolution of the fifth to sixth year , when the intelligentsia , who considered themselves revolutionary , - and indeed she took some actual part in organizing the first revolution - in the seventh-eighth years began to abruptly go to the right . Then came the cadet collection " Milestones " and a number of other works that pointed out and proved that intelligentsia with the working class and the revolution in general were not on their way. I had a desire to give the figure of such, in my opinion, a typical intellectual. I knew them personally and in quite a large number, but, in addition, I knew this intellectual historically, literary, and knew him as a type not only of our country, but also of France and England. This type of individualist, a man without fail of average intellectual abilities, devoid of any bright qualities, has been going on in literature throughout the 19th century. This type was with us. A man - a member of the revolutionary circle , then entered bourgeois statehood as its defender.
You probably do not need to be reminded that the intelligentsia that lives in exile abroad , slanders the Union of Soviets , organizes conspiracies and generally deals with vile things, this intelligentsia for the most part consists of the Samghins. Many of the people who are now slandering us in the most cynical way were people whom I did not consider very respectable ... There were few people who turned abruptly and for whom the social revolution was organically unacceptable. They considered themselves a superclass group. This turned out to be wrong, because as soon as what happened happened, they immediately turned their backs to one class, their faces to another. What else to say? I wanted to portray in Samghin's face such an intellectual of average cost, who goes through a number of moods, looking for himself the most independent place in life, where he would be comfortable both materially and internally.

For the foreign press, M. Gorky wrote in the form of an editorial introduction the following note on “The Life of Klim Samgin”:

In his new novel, M. Gorky set himself the task of depicting, with a possible fullness, the forty years of Russia's life, from the 80s to 1918. The novel should have the character of a chronicle that marks all the major events of these years, especially the years of the reign of Nicholas II . The novel is set in Moscow , St. Petersburg and the provinces ; representatives of all classes act in the novel. The author proposes to give a number of characters of Russian revolutionaries, sectarians , people declassified , etc.

In the center of the novel is the figure of the “involuntarily revolutionary”, out of fear of the inevitable revolution, the figure of a man who feels himself “a victim of history”. The author considers this figure to be typical. There are many women in the novel, a number of small personal dramas, paintings of the Khodynka catastrophe , on January 9, 1905 in St. Petersburg , the Moscow Uprising, and so on, right up to the time Gen. Yudenich . The author introduces into a series of episodic characters: Tsar Nicholas II, Savva Morozov , some artists, writers , which, in his opinion, gives the novel partly the character of the chronicle.

First part

The second part of

The third part

Fourth part

• In the manuscript of the third edition, the novel originally had the title "History of an empty soul."
• The total volume of the novel is approximately 1,500 pages.
• The total number of characters is over 800.
• In the ideological disputes of the heroes, more than 70 names of philosophers and politicians were sounded, Lev Tolstoy is mentioned on more than 100 pages, and Dostoevsky and Leonid Andreev on the same number. Gorky himself is also mentioned.
• Maxim Gorky was nominated in 1928 for the Nobel Prize for the novel “The Life of Klim Samgin” ^[1] .

In 1987, the self-titled multi-part television feature film was released . Director - Victor Titov ; in the role of Klim Samghin - Andrei Rudensky .

After a television demonstration on the series , a phrase uttered by one episodic character at the end of the first episode became popular when they seek Boris Varavka who drowned there in the wormwood ^[2] :

The commonly used option is: “Was there a boy?”

• Reznikov L. Ya. The story of M. Gorky “The Life of Klim Samgin”: Problems of the genre and style. - Petrozavodsk, 1964 .-- 532 s.
• Weinberg I. I. “The Life of Klim Samghin” by M. Gorky. Historical and literary commentary. - M.: Education, 1971. - 381 p.
• Vergelis A.P. Man is then. About the novel by Maxim Gorky, “The Life of Klim Samghin”. - Literature. - 2017. - No. 99.