PRETEXTS OF M. GORKYʼS NOVELTHE LIFE OF KLIM SAMGIN: ON THE QUESTION OF THE ARTISTIC EVOLUTION OF THE NOVEL GENRE IN THE LITERARY PROCESS OF THE 20<sup>th </sup>CENTURY
The article examines the history and current state of the problem of the point of view. The term point of view was introduced by Henry James in the essay The Art of Fiction (1884). It is, according to B. A. Uspensky, the central problem of the composition of the artwork. The article provides an overview of theoretical studies of the point of view concept in domestic and foreign literary studies. According to the narrative situations concept by F. K. Stantzel, that is one of the most authoritative in the field of literary theory of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, distinguishes three narrative situations, that characterize the I am-novel, the auctorial and the character novel. The author of the presented article relies on the work of a modern researcher S. I. Sukhikh The Life of Klim Samgin and The Evolution of Novel Form in Gorky's Work (1998), which analyzes the artistic evolution of his large prose works from the auctorial to the character novel and from the traditional type of novel structure to the biography/the chronicle type, in which biography, a man’s story is consubstantial with the history of the country. The author of the article examines the process of evolution of the idea of M. Gorky's novel The Life of Klim Samgin in the sketch The Life of Mr. Platon Iliich Penkin, fragments of Yakov Ivanovich and Dr. Ryakhin's Notes, and the novel All the Same, including its fragment Fair, analyzes the latest pretext as a kind of sketch of the character novel, on the pages of which the contours of The Life of Klim Samgin first appear, and concludes that the long-term Gorky's experiment on formo-type of large form works allowed the writer to create a unique final text.