Books: Last Volume

THE SPECTER—Maxim Gorki—Appleton-Century ($3.50).

In 1930 U. S. readers got the first volume of Maxim Gorki's lengthiest book. The story of Russian pre-Revolutionary intellectual life, it was called Bystander, revolved around an apathetic, intelligent provincial lawyer, Clim Samghim, who flirted all his life with the revolutionary movement, drifted with the winds of doctrine without ever finding harbor in a cause, a code of belief, a philosophy. Samghim's story was carried on—in so far as it moved at all—in The Magnet and Other Fires. Last week the fourth and last volume, left unfinished by Gorki...