“... I am writing something ‘farewell,’ a kind of novel-chronicle of forty years of Russian life,”—M. Gorky wrote while working on “The Life of Klim Samgin,” which at first he called “The Story of Empty Life.” This novel introduced readers to a new Gorky with a different manner of writing; it surprised with the scale of coverage of political and social events, masterful depictions of everyday life, and subtle psychological insight. A novel about people who, as the author put it, “invented their own lives,” “invented themselves”—and also about Russia, about the terrible tragedy that happened to the country: “I want to depict all our ‘khodynkas,’ all the massacres we offered as sacrifices to history in the years from the late 1880s to the 1910s.”