Тайна Клима Самгина

Ярославский педагогический вестник. 2018. № 4. С. 257–264.

Porus V. N.

In the article the attempt is made to «decode» the hidden plan of M. Gorky, who considers the novel «Klim Samgin's Life» to be the message to future generations. This novel was perceived as a research of the genotype of the Russian «petty-bourgeois» intellectual for decades, who made evolution from sympathetic participation in the revolutionary movement upto ideological opposition to the Bolshevism and anti-Soviet activity in emigration. Contrary to Gorky's declarations made under the pressure of the political situation in the Soviet Union in days of «a great change» and the Bolshevist interpretation of the novel, offered by A. Lunacharsky, the plan of the novel is deeper. Samgin is a «dummy», the parody to a special kind of the Russian intellectual of the era of the Russian revolutions in the beginning of the 20th century. The aspiration was peculiar to this social group in the shortest possible time «to replace» the ideas and values of the European culture in the soil of the Russian reality, first of all, the principle of independence and personal freedom. Implementation of this principle assumes deep transformation of this soil – all forms of public consciousness and public institutes. When there is a lack of such transformations «personal principle» degenerates in skeptical individualism and can not be the ontologic basis of culture. At the same time, «samginizm» becomes an inevitable result of destruction of two myths – about the intellectuals (as a social and cultural leader of the nation) and about «people» (as the carrier of the spiritual beginning and moral consciousness). Gorky managed to see Samgin as «the hero of the era of the individual» for whom the disappointment in universal cultural values, the attitude towards them as to «fictions» which are necessary for adaptation to reality, but not for its transformation, are typical. The novel by Gorky is not payment with the past, but a sad prophecy about the future.

Keywords: культурные ценности, индивидуализм, Максим Горький, онтология культуры, Клим Самгин, русский интеллигент