{"product_id":"smoke-ivan-turgenev","title":"Smoke by Ivan Turgenev (Paperback)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-bold\"\u003eA 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIvan Turgenev’s fifth novel, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eSmoke\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, 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 father’s neglected estate. He stops in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancée 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 Voltaire’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eCandide\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, he can only cultivate his garden.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Russians abroad in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eSmoke\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, whether revolutionaries or reactionaries, emerge as hypocritical bigots. Turgenev’s authorial character Potugin denounces both right-wing aristocrats and left-wing radicals—indeed all of Russia—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 “the smoke of the fatherland, sweet and pleasant” (a famous line by the playwright Griboyedov).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eSmoke\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e shares much with Gustave Flaubert’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eSentimental Education\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e: 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 \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eTorrents of Spring\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, Turgenev had already described a vulnerable hero robbed of a fiancée by a ruthless aristocratic woman. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"a-text-italic\"\u003eSmoke\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e is yet more powerful: readers will feel they have not just read, but experienced Litvinov’s trauma.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54851474391383,"sku":"9798896230441","price":15.49,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0799\/4569\/5575\/files\/200773488916.jpg?v=1788299176","url":"https:\/\/somiibooks.com\/products\/smoke-ivan-turgenev","provider":"Somiibooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}