The Life of Klim Samgin (Forty Years, is a four-volume novel written by Maxim Gorky from 1925 up to his death in 1936. It is Gorky's most ambitious work, intended to depict "all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century." It follows the decline of Russian "intelligentsia" from the start of 1870s and the assassination of Alexander II to the 1917 Revolution, seen by the eyes of Klim Samgin, a typical petit-bourgeois intellectual. The fourth and the final part is unfinished and abrupts with the beginning February Revolution, although as seen from Gorky's drafts and fragments, Lenin's return to Russia in April of 1917 and Samgin's death may have been intented as the finale.