“I write something like a farewell— a novel-chronicle of forty years of Russian life,” M. Gorky noted while working on “The Life of Klim Samgin,” which he first intended to call “The Story of an Empty Life.” The book appeared to the reader as a different, unfamiliar Gorky: a new manner of writing, a striking scope in depicting political and social upheavals, precise everyday details, and subtle psychological development of characters. This is a novel about people who, in the author’s words, “invented their own life” and “invented themselves,” and at the same time about Russia and its tragedy: Gorky strove to show all the national “Khodyankas,” all the “hecatombs” sacrificed to history from the late 1880s until 1918.