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Smoke - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev & Donald Rayfield

By Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev & Donald Rayfield

Release Date: 2026-07-14

Genre: Romance

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A young Russian man, engaged to be married, encounters his former love in a German spa town and is soon enmeshed in a torturous romantic tangle in this graceful, politically tinged love story by a Russian literary great.

Ivan Turgenevā€™s fifth novel, Smoke, published in 1867, differed from his previous novels, three of which had revolutionary heroes dying dramatically. His new hero, Grigori Litvinov, the most likeable protagonist in nineteenth-century Russian literature, is an intelligent but unremarkable man who returns from agronomical studies in Germany intending to marry then run his fatherā€™s neglected estate. He stops in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancĆ©e Tatiana and runs into his former love, the now aristocratic Irina, who is staying there with her husband. A dormant erotic passion overwhelms Litvinov; he jilts Tatiana and prepares to elope with Irina: a fatal mistake, yet Turgenev is merciful to his hero, who in time atones for his temporary insanity, realizing that like Voltaireā€™s Candide, he can only cultivate his garden.

The Russians abroad in Smoke, whether revolutionaries or reactionaries, emerge as hypocritical bigots. Turgenevā€™s authorial character Potugin denounces both right-wing aristocrats and left-wing radicalsā€”indeed all of Russiaā€”as irredeemably backward. Reactions were furious: Turgenev was forced to stay abroad. Tolstoy said that he loved only fornication, not his country; the poet Tiutchev that he was polluting ā€œthe smoke of the fatherland, sweet and pleasantā€ (a famous line by the playwright Griboyedov).

Smoke shares much with Gustave Flaubertā€™s Sentimental Education: the novels were written simultaneously; the authors were close friends, equally disillusioned. Flaubert likewise has an unremarkable hero, torn between two women and two political forces, though his monumental novel is more brutal, comparing a besotted lover to someone bringing a bunch of flowers to a brothel. In his novella Torrents of Spring, Turgenev had already described a vulnerable hero robbed of a fiancĆ©e by a ruthless aristocratic woman. Smoke is yet more powerful: readers will feel they have not just read, but experienced Litvinovā€™s trauma.

Smoke - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev & Donald Rayfield

By Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev & Donald Rayfield

Release Date: 2026-07-14

Genre: Romance

(0 ratings)
Read Download
A young Russian man, engaged to be married, encounters his former love in a German spa town and is soon enmeshed in a torturous romantic tangle in this graceful, politically tinged love story by a Russian literary great.

Ivan Turgenevā€™s fifth novel, Smoke, published in 1867, differed from his previous novels, three of which had revolutionary heroes dying dramatically. His new hero, Grigori Litvinov, the most likeable protagonist in nineteenth-century Russian literature, is an intelligent but unremarkable man who returns from agronomical studies in Germany intending to marry then run his fatherā€™s neglected estate. He stops in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancĆ©e Tatiana and runs into his former love, the now aristocratic Irina, who is staying there with her husband. A dormant erotic passion overwhelms Litvinov; he jilts Tatiana and prepares to elope with Irina: a fatal mistake, yet Turgenev is merciful to his hero, who in time atones for his temporary insanity, realizing that like Voltaireā€™s Candide, he can only cultivate his garden.

The Russians abroad in Smoke, whether revolutionaries or reactionaries, emerge as hypocritical bigots. Turgenevā€™s authorial character Potugin denounces both right-wing aristocrats and left-wing radicalsā€”indeed all of Russiaā€”as irredeemably backward. Reactions were furious: Turgenev was forced to stay abroad. Tolstoy said that he loved only fornication, not his country; the poet Tiutchev that he was polluting ā€œthe smoke of the fatherland, sweet and pleasantā€ (a famous line by the playwright Griboyedov).

Smoke shares much with Gustave Flaubertā€™s Sentimental Education: the novels were written simultaneously; the authors were close friends, equally disillusioned. Flaubert likewise has an unremarkable hero, torn between two women and two political forces, though his monumental novel is more brutal, comparing a besotted lover to someone bringing a bunch of flowers to a brothel. In his novella Torrents of Spring, Turgenev had already described a vulnerable hero robbed of a fiancĆ©e by a ruthless aristocratic woman. Smoke is yet more powerful: readers will feel they have not just read, but experienced Litvinovā€™s trauma.

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