Smoke by Ivan Turgenev

Pre-order: publication date is 14th July

In a new translation from the Russian by Donald Rayfield.

Ivan Turgenev's fifth novel, Smoke, caused a furore when it was published in 1867. Tolstoy claimed that his fellow writer loved only fornication, not his country; the poet Tiutchev that he was polluting "the smoke of the fatherland, sweet and pleasant". The novel's vulnerable hero, Grigori Litvinov, is an intelligent but unremarkable man who is on his way home from agronomical studies in Germany, intending to marry his fiancée Tatiana and run his father's neglected estate. He stops in Baden-Baden to meet Tatiana and runs into his former love, the ruthless and now aristocratic Irina, who is there with her husband. A dormant erotic passion overwhelms Litvinov; he jilts Tatiana and prepares to elope with Irina. Meanwhile, the Russians abroad, whether revolutionaries or reactionaries, from whom Litvinov keeps his distance, emerge as hypocritical bigots. The single man Litvinov admires, Potugin, denounces both right-wing aristocrats and left-wing radicals – indeed all of Russia – as irredeemably backward.

Paperback