Smoke
by Ivan Turgenev
Set in Baden-Baden, Smoke is one of Ivan Turgenev's most cosmopolitan novels. An exquisite exploration of politics and society and an ongoing touching love story. With its smoky European environment, its prickly intellect, and its visionary call for Russia to look west, it became the center of the well-known philosophical gap between Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Returning to Russia after several years in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired merchant action official, stops in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancée Tatyana. However, the chance to meet the former flame Manipulative Irina – now married to a general and a leading figure in aristocratic immigrant circles – reveals feelings buried deep in the young man's heart, undermining his future plans and plunging his life into turmoil. Around this love story, Turgenev builds a sharp satirical exposure of his compatriots, which plunges his author into a heated fight with Dostoevsky. A melancholic challenge to unfinished romanticism, Smoke represents the pinnacle of Turgenev's later fiction.
