“...I am writing something“ farewell ”, a kind of novel-chronicle of forty years of Russian life,” wrote M. Gorky, working on “The Life of Klim Samgin”, which at first he called “The History of an Empty Life”. This novel opened to the reader a new Gorky with a different writing style | I was surprised by the scale of coverage of political and social events, masterful description of everyday life, and subtle psychologism. A novel about people who, in the words of the author, “invented their own life”, “invented themselves”, and a novel about Russia, about a terrible tragedy that happened to the country: “I want to depict all our“ khodynki ”, all the hecatombs that we sacrificed history over the years from the late 80s to the 18th.