The Age of Upheaval and reflective Consciousness: The experience of analyzing the Ethical concept of Klim Samgin (based on the novel by M. Gorky)

UDC 821.161.1-31
DOI 10.20339/PhS.6-25.078

Gavrish Tatyana R.,

Candidate of Philology, Senior Researcher

Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences

e-mail: berenica25@yandex.ru

The image of the main character of M. Gorky’s novel “The Life of Klim Samgin” (1925–1936) is one of the most complex and ambiguous in the writer’s work. Classical Russian literary criticism considered the image of Klim Samgin almost exclusively as negative. Indeed, neither obvious cruelty, nor petty vindictiveness, nor even elementary rudeness are alien to Gorky’s hero, whereas good-naturedness is essentially unfamiliar to him. However, a thorough and impartial analysis of Klim Samgin’s image does not imply the need to convict him. The main character of Gorky’s novel sometimes experiences moments of truth, and there are many of them. Despite the fact that Samgin’s attitude to people, society, and the world as a whole is not subject to a specific ethical code, this “not positive” hero is familiar with a peculiar reflection, a sincere spiritual impulse, and even an act, contrary to the traditional opinion about Samgin as a man of “words” rather than deeds.  Gorky’s final novel recreates the type of reflective consciousness characteristic of the dramatically changing Russian reality of the era of revolutions. Thus, the central character of the novel is not an answer, but a very difficult question addressed by the writer to the generation of the main character, on the one hand, and to the contemporary reader, on the other.

Keywords: “The Life of Klim Samgin”, tradition, intellectual, character as a question, ethics

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