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) was born into a wealthy family of the Russian landed gentry and educated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. He made his name as a writer with A Sportsman’s Sketches, an unvarnished picture of Russian country life that is said to have influenced Tsar Alexander II’s decision to liberate the serfs. In later years, Turgenev lived in Europe, returning only rarely to his native country. He was the author of poems, stories, plays, and six novels, the most celebrated of which include Fathers and Children and Virgin Soil.

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. In addition to books and articles on Russian literature (notably Anton Chekhov: A Life), he is the author of many articles on Georgian writers and of a history of Georgian literature. He was the chief editor of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. He has translated several novels, including Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance from the Uzbek, Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, as well as Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World.

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