The Will to Power and the Subject in Maxim Gorky's Literary Prose (Nietzschean Motifs of the Story The Life of Klim Samgin)

The article considers the Nietzschean motifs of Maxim Gorky's final story The Life of Klim Samgin. Nietzsche's teachings, which served as the source of a nonclassical type of philosophical thought, make it possible to form a new conceptual horizon for reading Gorky's story. The aim of the study is to explicate the iconic concepts of modern non-classical philosophy: chaos, discourse, death of the subject, death of the author, creativity and will to power, in The Life of Klim Samgin. The article uses the methodology and guidelines of comparative literature. As a result of the research, a new approach to the evaluation of the ideological content of Gorky's story is proposed. Nietzschean motifs constitute only one aspect of the complex and multidimensional system of late Gorky's literary and philosophical views. This aspect requires a careful study. The problem lies in the fact that the literature on Gorky fixes the idea that the writer, in the early, romantic period of his work, went through a passion for Nietzsche's ideas, and later changed his attitude towards the German philosopher to a critical one. Without disputing the validity of this thesis, the author aims to prove that Nietzsche's philosophical views retain their significant influence on the ideology and imagery of Gorky's works during the late period of his work. Undoubtedly, the writer's attitude towards the philosopher's views became more complex and differentiated over time, but Gorky's complete liberation from the influence of Nietzsche's ideas is out of discussion. The article substantiates the thesis that, in The Life of Klim Samgin, not only a wide panorama of the social reality of the pre-revolutionary epoch of Russia is presented, but also a peculiar ontological picture of the universe is developed. From the first to the last part in the work, the idea of the world as chaos is asserted. Chaos is an unformed variety that is not reduced to unity. The article concludes that Gorky's Life of Klim Samgin also has a beginning that counteracts the chaos of world nonsense, a beginning that seeks to give a certain form to chaos, to conclude an immeasurable flow of the heterogeneous and the incompatible into certain borders. This organising principle is repeatedly referred to in the story as a “system of phrases”, which is a text or a discourse. But a closer look at the problem shows that this “system of phrases” does not really organise chaos, but acts only as another kind of chaos itself. The thesis is substantiated that The Life of Klim Samgin is organised according to the principle of a polyphonic novel. The book presents a genuine polyphony of points of view, an abundance of voices contending, intersecting and overlapping each other, or “systems of phrases”. The statements and ideological positions of numerous characters are complemented by the positions of famous philosophers, writers and politicians. Freedom from the “grid of words” for Klim Samgin is only pathos, only a beautiful posture that allows one to see oneself in a more or less attractive perspective. Throughout all four parts, Samgin is intensely searching for his own “system of phrases”. And he does not find it. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that Samgin's experience is not exclusively negative. There is something positive about his life path. But this positive derives from total negation. In the earthly existence, Klim Samgin cannot find anything that would satisfy his desire for meaning. This dissatisfaction, this stubborn unwillingness to be limited show the hidden longing for absolute sense. In The Life of Klim Samgin, the negative statement of the Absolute is achieved.