The Life of Klim Samgin

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: The reviews of the novel given by Gorky's contemporaries were mixed. For example, the white émigré critic Gleb Struve said that all the parts of the novel suffered from compositional problems. Furthermore, in a letter to Gorky, Pasternak noted its poetic features (see below) and gave a favorable estimate of the novel because it was close to his own views on the contemporary epic. He also praised the novel's complexity because it "forced the reader to make an effort to follow Samgin's growth and development". Marc Slonim, also a white émigré critic, described the book in 1958 as "an artistic failure", a "fragmentary and shapeless work", while Andrei Sinyavsky wrote a dissertation about the novel, in which, while keeping to the standards of the "political consciousness" that Soviet dissertations required, he also defended Gorky's style and described the novel's poetics and its formal elements, including its polyphony, this being uncharacteristic of Soviet criticism of Gorky's work. On the other hand, Alexander Kaun left a favourable review in the Saturday Review and wrote that it is not a historical novel, but an "immediate" and "kaleidoscopic" "panorama" that represents "discomfort of contemporary Russians who lived in the chaos of an unduly protracted period of storm and stress." The novel was praised by Brian Howard. Gorky's "insight into the paralysis of the doomed intellectual" appealed to him, and in his 1938 review of the novel he called Samgin, the main character, "so universal, and so very contemporary", "almost ideally representative intellectual of our time", in whom Gorky "so thoroughly" "explored the whole intellectual and historical panorama, that he has created". "What Gork[y] intended was to expose the paralysis that attacks the majority of intellectuals when once they realise that the system in which they live is doomed", Howard wrote, "and he has succeeded so well that [the novel] seems to include portraits of a great many people one knows." Richard Freeborn wrote in 1985: == 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. 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". Boris Pasternak wrote that the novel is remarkable for space, showered "with moving color," dammed up "with crowding details," "the essence of history, which lies in the chemical regeneration of each of its moments" and communicated "with the forcefulness of suggestion". The Life of Klim Samgin, despite the interpretation of the official Soviet critic as the work of Socialist Realism, 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''. 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''". Mikhail Bakhtin and Georgy Gachev saw The Life of Klim Samgin as a carnivalesque work, "an expression of... internalized carnival". Bakhtin said that "there may not be much festivity and joy there, but still – we are presented with a parade of masks... There are no individual faces." == Portrayal of the Revolution ==

One of the reasons of Stalin's rejection of the novel (see above) was the little role of the Bolsheviks in the novel. 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. Armin Knigge notes that by showing Kutuzov through Samgin's eyes, who dislikes Kutuzov and makes a negative characteristic of him, Gorky not only ironically presents Samgin, but "also expresses his solidarity with him in a certain way". He also argues that Kutuzov's role of a revolutionary leader "is also contradicted by the fact that he rarely appears in the foreground of the action", and that the revolutionary pathos doesn't become the dominating spirit of the novel, as although there are many sincere revolutionaries portrayed, "the community of revolutionaries does not appear as a powerful movement, nor as the well-organized avant-garde of such a movement, but rather as a circle of believers and self-sacrificing supporters of an idea" who represent "a small minority" in the depicted society. == English translation ==

The first volume was translated as Bernard Guilbert Guerney, a translator whose translation of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls Vladimir Nabokov would later praise as "an extraordinarily fine piece of work", and published in 1930 under the title Bystander, while the other three were translated by theatre critic Alexander Bakshy as The Magnet (Volume II, published in 1931), Other Fires (Volume III, published in 1933) and The Specter (the unfinished final fourth volume, published in 1938). The whole work was referred as Forty Years: The Life of Clim Samghin and labeled as a "tetralogy of novels". After that, the translation of Guerney and Bakshy was never reissued, and there were no other attempts to translate the novel; Aaron Lake Smith wrote in ''Lapham's Quarterly'' that "Gorky's work is so unavailable that it's almost suspicious, as if there might still be a wizened Cold Warrior clanking away in a basement office somewhere in Washington... Why have there been no reissues?" Despite that the first volume is divided only into five lengthy chapters and the rest of the novel takes the form of uninterrupted narrative, it is divided into strict short chapters in the translation. == Screen adaptation ==

The novel was turned into the eponymous TV series by Viktor Titov in 1988. == References ==