The Life of a Useless Man
novel by Maxim Gorky
The Life of a Useless Man (pre-reform Russian: Жизнь ненужнаго человѣка; post-reform Russian: Жизнь ненужного человека, romanized: Zhizn' nenuzhnogo cheloveka, also translated as The Spy: The Story of a Superfluous Man) is a 1908 novel by Maxim Gorky. It concerns the "plague of espionage" under the Empire; the protagonist is Yevsey Klimkov, who spies for the Tsarist regime.
Plot
The orphan boy Yevsey Klimkov is apprenticed to the owner of a shop, who secretly sells prohibited revolutionary books and then informs on his customers to the police. The bookseller is murdered, and the bereft, frail, and weak Klimkov is coerced by the Tsarist police to be a spy and informer.
Klimkov admires the revolutionaries, but lives in fear of being discovered by them. He consoles himself that he is just following orders, but when unable to gather sufficient information, he makes it up. The role of the agent provocateur is commended to Klimkov, and he takes it: he encourages some revolutionaries to produce illegal pamphlets, supplies them with the printing facilities, and then has them arrested. His reward is 25 rubles for sending seven people to prison.
Torn inside, Klimkov confesses to one of the revolutionaries, then tries to assassinate the police chief in revenge of his plight. He fails, and then hangs himself.
“The Life of a Useless Man” enters the record as novel by Maxim Gorky. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Life, Useless and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20828843. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1908.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Life of a Useless Man” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.