Smoke

“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

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883)

Born into a wealthy family of the Russian landed gentry, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was educated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. He gained recognition for his collection A Sportsman’s Sketches, a stark portrayal of Russian rural life that is believed to have influenced Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs. Turgenev spent his later years living in Europe, making only infrequent visits to Russia. He authored poems, stories, plays, and six novels, with Fathers and Children and Virgin Soil being among his most acclaimed works.

Donald Rayfield

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. His extensive literary contributions include books and articles on Russian literature, most notably Anton Chekhov- A Life. He has also written numerous articles on Georgian writers and a history of Georgian literature. Rayfield was the chief editor of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. His translation work includes several novels, such as Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance from Uzbek, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World.

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