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Smoke

Smoke

by Ivan Turgenev, translated from the Russian by Donald Rayfield

$17.95
$17.95
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Smoke is temporarily out of stock.

The August selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

Ivan Turgenev's fifth novel, Smoke, caused a furor when it was published in 1867. Tolstoy claimed that his fellow writer loved only fornication, not his country; the poet Tiutchev that he was polluting "the smoke of the fatherland, sweet and pleasant." The novel's vulnerable hero, Grigori Litvinov, is an intelligent but unremarkable man who is on his way home from agronomical studies in Germany, intending to marry his fiancée Tatiana and run his father's neglected estate. He stops in Baden-Baden to meet Tatiana and runs into his former love, the ruthless and now aristocratic Irina, who is there with her husband. A dormant erotic passion overwhelms Litvinov; he jilts Tatiana and prepares to elope with Irina. Meanwhile, the Russians abroad, whether revolutionaries or reactionaries, from whom Litvinov keeps his distance, emerge as hypocritical bigots. The single man Litvinov admires, Potugin, denounces both right-wing aristocrats and left-wing radicals—indeed all of Russia—as irredeemably backward.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230441
Pages: 208
Publication Date:

Praise

Smoke is a great love story by Ivan Turgenev, in which love doesn’t change the world, but the world changes love. A memorable portrait of Russians in the 19th century, especially those who lived in Baden-Baden, Germany, talking loud, drinking a lot, posturing, and ultimately unable to escape themselves.
—Christian Petzold

Turgenev was not given to nationalistic romanticism or to giving speeches. He represented what to the modern state remains troublesome: a man who desires neither to lead nor to be followed.
—Hisham Matar, The Guardian

[Ivan Turgenev] was driven by a passionate curiosity about his fellow men, and a gratitude for their endless complexity that ran far deeper than mere judgment. Reading Turgenev provokes the question: Can we learn from him? Can we, too, remove ourselves just enough from our intractable conflicts to find them fascinating, to find them amazing—even to love them?
—Sam Sacks, on Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, The Wall Street Journal

[Ivan Turgenev] faithfully described them all—the talkers, the idealists, the fighters, the cowards, the reactionaries, and the radicals, sometimes, as in Smoke, with biting polemical irony, but, as a rule, so scrupulously, with so much understanding for all the overlapping sides of every question, so much unruffled patience, touched only occasionally with undisguised irony or satire (without sparing his own character and views), that he angered almost everyone at some time.
— Isaiah Berlin, The New York Review of Books

There is nothing in literature more stinging than the satire of the first six chapters of Smoke, which has a quality of Dickens about it. This is not hatred, however. While laughing bitterly at his young "intellectual" countrymen, Turgenev understands them; they, like himself, are creatures of environment and heredity.
—John Reed, from the introduction to the 1919 edition of Smoke

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