Word: samghin
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...Magnet (TIME, April 14, 1930 & April 27, 1931) have appeared; Other Fires is the third, next to last. Proletarian novels (say strict Communists) must have no hero to stand between the reader and the hymning of mass achievements. But Gorki's epic novel has a hero, one Clim Samghin, who is the central character in all three books. Even strict Communists should not find him uncanonical, however, for Hero Samghin is no real hero but merely a convenient eyewitness of Russia's revolutionary tides, a horrible example (if Soviet preachers want him for a text) of the treacherously...
First two volumes cover the period from the death of Alexander II to the year of the first revolution (1905). Other Fires ends just before the World War. Clim Samghin, lawyer and intellectual, has married his old flame. Varvara, but has discovered she is much too stupid for him. Interested, but never actively, in the social upheaval that is going on about him, Clim manages to keep his head above the emotional flood, picks a careful way between whirlpools. But revolutionary Moscow is no place for a spectator: he dodges bullets, gets beaten up on the street, finally leaves Moscow...
...exist (to the U. S.), Soviet Russia is doing pretty well in gross tonnage of literary exports. Maxim Gorki's latest (839 pages) ups the total by at least a couple of pounds. A continuation of Bystander (TIME, April 14, 1930), The Magnet carries the story of Clim Samghin, myopic Russian intellectual, a few hundred thousand words nearer its goal...
Sympathetic with the revolutionists but not an active revolutionist himself, Author Gorki has written not propaganda but a chronicle of the Russian intellectuals. The scene is laid in Russia of some 30 years back; the story ends at the time of the late Tsar's coronation. Hero Clim Samghin is a pale, near-sighted youth, long on brains, short on emotions, whose inamorata says to him: "You're slippery. . . . And you have no words which are dear to you." Clim is a precocious but unattractive child, becomes a clever but unattractive young man. He goes to the university...
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