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The Manuscript of The Life of Klim Samgin

In the first year of this blog I happened to be anticipating the release of Quiet Flows the Don (2006) whereby I was researching the subject and came across Sholokhov’s 1926 manuscript. It was an amazing coincidence because I wrote the post 80 years after Sholokhov drafted the text.

Not in a dissimilar fashion I have just discovered a photo taken at Gorky’s archive at the State Literary Institute in Moscow. The photo by A. Cheprunov (STF) shows the manuscripts of The Life of Klim Samgin, as well as Gorky’s letter to Anton Chekhov. The photo was taken in 1955, but unfortunately there is no information as to the dates of manuscripts themselves.

 What I find amazing, and so will you surely, is that Gorky’s copies are impressively neat. I’ve never seen his other manuscripts, but what is shown in the picture suggests an amazing clarity of his creative vision.

The image is courtesy of RIA Novosti archives in Moscow.

The Life of Klim Samgin (1987)

The Life of Klim Samgin is perhaps the most dramatic, deep and fateful novel by Maxim Gorky. In 1980s Victor Titov made it into a film.

I have written about the film The Life of Klim Samgin previously in the Russian Los Cuadernos, but I don’t think I have actually mentioned it in English. Certainly, not in the way I am about to mention it now.

life-of-klim-samgin
 

Meanwhile, The Life of Klim Samgin is perhaps the most dramatic, deep and fateful (even for its author) novel by Maxim Gorky. It was set out to describe the all-embracing internal tragedy of its protagonist, Klim Samgin, the offspring of the family of intellectuals, who was unable to find a place for himself in Russia’s political climate at the turn of the 19-20th cc. However, by depicting Samgin’s excruciating journey in search of a middle ground between continuous doubt and a burning desire to belong but also to dominate, Gorky somewhat unwittingly but very convincingly narrated the drama of many Russian intellectuals who upheld the revolutionary ideals, only to be repelled by the realisation thereof.

This personal journey of tremendous difficulty is precisely what makes the figure of Samgin rather appealing, especially in the liberal climate. He appears to be the one who constantly questions the world around him, wearing the mask of a dashing individualism all the while. His sense of self-worth doesn’t fail to engage the reader, as neither does his constant doubt which is in sync with how we understand an individual; with how we define our attitude to the Revolution; and even with the image of ‘a mysterious Russian soul’.

At the same time, as one reads the novel or watches the film, one can’t help feeling pity for Samgin. At one point at the very beginning of his story we see one of the characters describing an intellectual as this: “he doesn’t see the sadness of his role – the role of a child who is daydreaming while crossing the street, oblivious to the fact that in a moment he is to be crushed by the heavy cart of History, navigated by the experienced yet not very delicate whips“. As the life of Klim Samgin unravels, we understand that it is this very child, invested with a mission which he only vaguely comprehends. Often he is the hostage of events, a pawn not only for his parents or friends, but most importantly – for the people, the powers, and History, too.

I really love meditating about a few phrases that J.-P. Sartre dropped on the final page of Words. Culture neither saves nor justifies anyone; but it is the mirror for the mankind. The Life of Klim Samgin, conceived by Gorky as the vast chronicle of the Russian life and history from 1877 until 1917, can be seen exactly as this kind of a mirror that, predictably, is still of much use.

It was of very much use when back in the 1980s the now late Russian director Viktor Titov took to make a film based on Gorky’s novel. From comparing the text and the film, I can say that this was indeed a titanic work, and it is obvious that Titov had worked on the script for a very long time. Gorky’s novel was left unfinished, but even so it consists of four parts, and what a good student of the novel and the script quickly notices is that the script easily creates a succinct version of very many pages. While this is not surprising, in the context of the film that very closely follows Gorky’s language, this is an important trait. The whole work came out as a 14-episode TV series, every episode lasting just over 1 hour. In effect, it is a series of 14 features, joined together by unfailing directing, the brilliant and critically acclaimed work of the crew, and the outstanding performance of the cast.

The film was finished by 1987, and I believe it was in 1988/89 that I saw it for the first time on TV. Just like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were my gateway into writing, so The Life of Klim Samgin opened the treasures of world’s literature – and of the home library. I was so impressed by the film that I felt compelled to go and search the bookcases for Gorky’s books. Surprisingly or not, I was able to find one of the volumes from Gorky’s collected works, quite an old book with yellowy pages; one of Klim Samgin‘s parts was included in that volume. I didn’t read it then, but I found a few more old books there, and this was a fortuitous and important discovery, considering that I wasn’t even 10 years old.

Many years later I rediscovered the leading actor in this film, Andrei Rudensky. It was pretty amazing to suddenly read an interview with him in one of Moscow’s magazines. It was in 2003, and it brought many reminiscences of my childhood, including the one I’d just mentioned, about the home library. Moreover, although by 2003 it’d be 15 years since I watched the film, I realised that I remembered it quite well.

This meant that The Life of Klim Samgin left a much deeper impression that I could myself imagine. Turned out, he was about my age now when he was working on The Life of Klim Samgin, and it was his cinema debut. Considering that he had to portray his character from the age of 17 until the age of 40, this was certainly an outstanding achievement for him both personally and career-wise.

If you are interested reading more about Maxim Gorky and have a look at the selection of his work, here is the start: Maxim Gorky – Biography and Works.

 

 

Exercises in Loneliness – III

Generally, I love sleepless nights. I love the time when I can read or write, without being disturbed. There is only one exception – I prefer when I am actually enjoying either writing or reading. At the moment, I’m about to embark on a very lengthy text on the topic of martyrdom in Sikhism. And although I already know and understand how the text should be written, I find it daunting to write because – God knows! – I’d prefer to write about something else. More inspiring. More creative.

To stay up in the night has never been difficult for me. I don’t even know how I came to develop such ability. When I was a student, however, my mates at the Uni used to ask me (quite seriously!), what to do in order to stay awake. The question would normally rise during the exam session. I could never give any sound advice, and from what I know, they never actually stayed up.

Writing daunting texts is also nothing new. Back in 2000, I was in my third year and had been writing an essay on Soviet literature between 1925 and 1935. Or, I’d better say, I’d been trying to write such essay. I knew the topic very well, but, strangely, the knowledge had put me off writing the text. The final day of submission was 15 May. 14 May was my mother’s birthday, and we had guests. They left at about 9pm, and I went to the computer. Ten hours later I had written 30 pages – exactly what was required. I took it to the tutor. A week later she told me that she absolutely loved my work and couldn’t find words to express her regret that we hadn’t discuss my essay in our seminar. Well… Perhaps, I’ll rework it for an article one day. :))

The text I need to write now is exactly a half of those 30 pages. The topic – martyrdom – borders on history, philosophy and religion, and I’m looking at the whole of the 17th c. Of course, Asia is not Europe, but the 17th c. is not something totally inconceivable. I think it’s because of him. He is Pascal Quignard. Ever since I read ‘Terrace a Rome’ I wanted to find and read as many of his works, as possible. I couldn’t start reading, but I actually found the Russian translation of ‘Tous les Matins du Monde’ (All the World’s Mornings/Все утра мира) and a couple of extracts from his essay ‘Le Sexe et L’Effroi’ (Sex and Terror/ Секс и страх). And it’s because I’d rather read these works that I find it difficult to write about those Sikh martyrs.

In my life as a reader I went through a series of very intense ‘love affairs’ with different authors. Those whose works I most hungrily devoured were Gorky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, de Sade, Henry Miller, Maugham, Sueskind, Marquez, Llosa, and Vonnegut. Oh, yes, also Wilde, Prevert, and most Russian poets. I’ve got to stop here, otherwise martyrdom will be completely forgotten.

Anyway, I know what I’m going to add to my birthday/Christmas/New Year list. It’s the works of Pascal Quignard. In English, French or Russian, it doesn’t matter.

And an extract from one of his interviews. You can read the article in full here.

Wandering Shadows or the insecurity of thinking
I certainly was not planning to embark on anything so long, I wanted to write books that did not exceed the capacity of my head, if I can put it that way, that I could skim through panoptically. But something like a wave began to get bigger and bigger and to engulf me, as though it was saying to me “Don’t be so cautious with your own life.”
Les Ombres Errantes is the book that has the greatest biographical content. It is important to me that a thought is totally involved in the life you are leading. In this book, I make clear my determination to create a hermitage within the modern world where I praise insecurity of thinking, while the societies in which we live advocate the opposite. The same thing happened at the end of the Roman Empire: in order to counter the return of religious monotheism and imperial pacification, many hermitages were created. The values that are now coming back are all the ones I detest. The return of faith terrifies me and I am filled with despair to see my own friends becoming believers and doctrinarians. We are living in 1571. This St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre atmosphere had to be described. The Wars of Religion are beginning again. Woman is being deified. Death adored. Democracy more violent and inegalitarian than in Pericles’ day. Technology, the object of all worship, and the all-pervasive cult of youth is worse than primitive – it is untamed, psychotic.
Interview conducted by Catherine Argand

Mother (and mama mia!)

It is no news that early Soviet films are well-known, treasured and studied in the West. Not only many of those films commemorated pivotal figures and moments in Russian history (Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Nevsky and The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, Peter the First by Vladimir Petrov), they can also shed a lot of light on the early Soviet ideology. Cinema, as many statesmen of the time understood, possessed the immense importance as the way to disseminate ideas in the form of art.

[I have to put in a historical note: unlike the 16th zealous European Reformers, Soviet leaders understood very well that to educate a then largely illiterate population, they had to make emphasis on artistic representation, of which cinema and posters were the most straight-forward. Having said that, one shouldn’t be too hard on the 16th c. people – after all, they did have engravings].

So, here is a very good article by Cara Marisa Deleon about one of the best-known films of the era, Mat’ (Mother) by Vsevolod Pudovkin. You can check the film’s details here, as well as Pudovkin’s filmography, which includes several historical films, Admiral Nakhimov (he was the hero of the Crimean war, 1853-56), and Suvorov (this outstanding soldier was awarded with the title of generalissimus and had crossed the Alpes in 1799, at the age of 70!).

And if you are interested in the history of Soviet Russia and want to read a novel that inspired the film, you’re very lucky because The Project Gutenberg has got an English translation of this famous novel by Maxim Gorky. I hope you have a pleasant reading. If you wish to know which of Gorky’s works to read next, don’t hesitate to ask – he’d written loads, and I’ve read at least a half.

And as I was writing this post I received a voicemail from a friend of mine. He’s been a volunteer with the Red Cross since early this year, has been to many duties, and was interviewed for The LOOK. Now he rang to invite me to appear as a casualty extra on an educational DVD. Things would be as realistic as possible, he said. Which, knowing my luck, might very well turn into a real casualty. I know, Paul, you mean well, but… sorry, no!!!

Update (01 October 2008):

Recently I was researching in the library and saw a book Berlin – Moskau, 1900-1950. This was an extensive exhibition covering the cultural relations between the two capitals throughout the first half of the 20th c., and I attended it at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in 1996. The book, which is not only an exhibition’s catalogue, but also a collection of essays (in German), sheds more light on the intercultural dialogue between Germany and Russia. One particular article that I read was about the mutual reception of German and Soviet films; the “German” part having been written by Ulrich Gregor. Gregor speaks extensively about the anticipation and reception of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin among the German film enthusiasts, critics, and intellectuals, but a few words are also spared for Pudovkin’s films, Mother (1926) and The End of St Petersburg (1927).

“A similarly powerful reception was bestowed on Pudovkin’s films… Rudolf Arnheim wrote in Stachelschwein about The Mother: “This film is in the range of Potemkin and is also similar to it in many ways… Pudovkin’s film is so full of ideas that one’s heart doesn’t want to stop throbbing (Pudowkins Film ist so voll von Einfaellen, dass sich das Herz klopfen gar nicht legen will)”.

Above is the poster to the 1926 German premiere of The Mother.

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