Ivan Turgenev 
Smoke 

First published in Russian in 1867 as
Dym, ‘Smoke’ is Ivan Turgenev’s most cosmopolitan novel. Set in Baden-Baden, Germany, it combines a sensitive love story with political satire.



While waiting in fashionable Baden to meet Tanya Shestoff, his fiancée, Grigory Litvinov, the young heir to a declining Russian estate, encounters his former love, the beautiful and covetous Irina. The working out of Grigory’s choices in love provides the principal plot of ‘Smoke’. The political questions of the day are a secondary focus in the novel as Grigory also meets various members of both the left and the right wing of the intelligentsia and is equally appalled by all but Potugin, a Russian who voices the author’s own views about life and politics.



‘Smoke’ is an exquisite study of politics and society and an enduringly poignant love story. The novel, with its European setting, barbed wit, and visionary call for Russia to look west, became the centre of a famous philosophical breach between Turgenev and Dostoevsky.