Ivan Turgenev: Smoke, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

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 Turgenev'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 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 Candide , he can only cultivate his garden.

The Russians abroad in Smoke , 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).

Smoke shares much with Gustave Flaubert'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 fiancée by a ruthless aristocratic woman. Smoke is yet more powerful: readers will feel they have not just read, but experienced Litvinov's trauma.