Books: Last Volume

THE SPECTER—Maxim Gorki—Appleton-Century ($3.50).

In 1930 U. S. readers got the first volume of Maxim Gorki’s lengthiest book. The story of Russian pre-Revolutionary intellectual life, it was called Bystander, revolved around an apathetic, intelligent provincial lawyer, Clim Samghim, who flirted all his life with the revolutionary movement, drifted with the winds of doctrine without ever finding harbor in a cause, a code of belief, a philosophy. Samghim’s story was carried on—in so far as it moved at all—in The Magnet and Other Fires. Last week the fourth and last volume, left unfinished by Gorki at his death in 1936. was published as The Specter, showed Samghim just as irresolute as he had been in the preceding 2,000 pages.

Why Gorki wanted to write 2,700 pages about this dull and will-less man is almost as great a mystery as the Moscow trials that disclosed a fantastic story of Gorki’s death.* The Specter begins with Samghim feebly awakened by an interest in a bold, mysterious client, Marina Zotova, who is mixed up in some shady negotiations over the sale of property in the Urals. But soon after they meet in Paris she is murdered, and suspicion of him in his home town drives him to Moscow. His wife, from whom he has been separated for years, dies, and Samghim becomes involved with a wealthy widow, with Bolsheviks before the Revolution, speculators during the War. Notes left by Gorki suggest that Samghim was to come to feel a personal hatred of Lenin, and to die in the Bolshevik seizure of power. Like the earlier volumes, The Specter is crowded with philosophic and political speculations, with scenes of suicides and bitter intellectual quarrels, with an oppressive boredom, which is the one sensation Clim Samghim feels strongly. Although The Specter is not likely to impress U. S. readers as a novel, the massive work of which it is part may well stand as a record of Russian intellectual life, for if Clim Samghim lacks reality as a human being, he responds like a barometer to changing pressures in stormy Russian politics.

* According to testimony at the trial, doctors either killed him or hastened his death.