'Smoke' was first published in 1867, several years after Turgenev had fixed his home in Baden, with his friends the Viardots. Baden at this date was a favourite resort for all circles of Russian society, and Turgenev was able to study at his leisure his countrymen as they appeared to foreign critical eyes. The novel is therefore the most cosmopolitan of all Turgenev's works. On a veiled background of the great world of European society, little groups of representative Russians, members of the aristocratic and the Young Russia parties, are etched with an incisive, unfaltering hand. Smoke, as an historical study, though it yields in importance to Fathers and Children and Virgin Soil, is of great significance to Russians. It might with truth have been namedTransition, for the generation it paints was then midway between the early philosophical Nihilism of the sixties and the active political Nihilism of the seventies.
- ISBN10 3732637190
- ISBN13 9783732637195
- Publish Date 4 April 2018 (first published 1 December 1998)
- Publish Status Active
- Imprint Outlook Verlag
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 178
- Language English