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.
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".
Milovan Djilas cites his words said in 1948: I pointed out that I regarded as [Gorky's] greatest work – both in method and in the profundity of its picture of the Russian Revolution – The Life of Klim Samgin.
[11] On the other hand, Boris Pasternak after reading the first part was "struck by Gorky's emphasis on the decisive role of the intelligentsia in the revolution, his understanding of its broad national character transcending caste and class divisions".
[11] Marc Slonim, also a white émigré critic, described the book in 1958 as "an artistic failure", a "fragmentary and shapeless work",[14] 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.
"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.
[1] 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.
[2] 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".
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.
[5] 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.
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.
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.