Smoke by Ivan Turgenev, Fiction, Classics, Literary - Softcover

Turgenev, Ivan

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9781592243891: Smoke by Ivan Turgenev, Fiction, Classics, Literary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1592243894 ISBN 13: 9781592243891

Publisher: Wildside Press, 2003

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"The profound disillusion following the failure of the Revolutionary movement of 1848, which swept over the intellectuals of Europe, had also its characteristic repercussion among the intellectual youth of Russia, and made a generation like the later generation so well portrayed by Chekov -- the men of the 1880s, and also like the Intelligentsia after the failure of the Revolution of 1905. The restless futility, self-searching, flabbiness of will so native to this type are incarnate in one of Turgenev's greatest characters, Rudin. They persist in numerous characters in Smoke, and are not absent from the make-up of Litvinov himself -- nor of Turgenev, for that matter. The conception of the futility of effort, of revolution, of political ideas in general, the tranquility attained only by seeing life from the standpoint of eternity, Turgenev had already enunciated in Fathers and Children. He wished to see life with Olympian calm; the irony of Basarov's death is a keynote of his profound pessimism. But in Smoke there is bitter satire, showing that life to him was still a battle, an exasperation." -- from John Reed's 1919 Introduction to SMOKE

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About the Author:

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818 - 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian realism and his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction. Turgenev's artistic purity made him a favorite of like-minded novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom greatly preferred Turgenev to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. James, who wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev's work, claimed that "his merit of form is of the first order" (1873) and praised his "exquisite delicacy", which "makes too many of his rivals appear to hold us, in comparison, by violent means and introduce us, in comparison, to vulgar things" (1896). Vladimir Nabokov, notorious for his casual dismissal of many great writers, praised Turgenev's "plastic musical flowing prose", but criticized his "labored epilogues" and "banal handling of plots". Nabokov stated that Turgenev "is not a great writer, though a pleasant one" and ranked him fourth among nineteenth-century Russian prose writers, behind Tolstoy, Gogol and Anton Chekhov, but ahead of Dostoyevsky. His idealistic ideas about love, specifically the devotion a wife should show her husband, were cynically referred to by characters in Chekhov's "An Anonymous Story".

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