Smoke
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
First published in 1867, Ivan Turgenev's Smoke is a masterwork of Russian realism that cuts to the heart of a nation torn between its slavish admiration for the West and the seductive pull of its own turbulent past. Set in the fashionable spa town of Baden-Baden, the novel chronicles the tumultuous inner journey of Grigory Litvinov, a young Russian landowner who arrives intending to marry his devoted fiancée, only to be ambushed by a consuming passion for Irina, the aristocratic woman who once broke his heart — and who threatens to do so again. With razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, Turgenev captures the hollow posturing of the Russian intelligentsia and aristocracy alike, rendering their endless political debates and social performances as insubstantial as the smoke of the title. Beyond its gripping romantic entanglement, Smoke stands as one of Turgenev's most politically daring works, a novel that scandalized both the radical left and the conservative right upon its publication and cemented its author's reputation as literature's most clear-eyed social anatomist. Turgenev's prose is characteristically elegant — lyrical yet precise, warm yet devastating — and his portraits of ideological posturing remain as bracingly relevant today as they were in Tsarist Russia. A novel that asks whether a man — or a nation — can ever truly escape its own illusions, Smoke leaves the reader with a question that lingers long after the final page.
Author: Ivan Turgenev
Format: Hardback
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
First published in 1867, Ivan Turgenev's Smoke is a masterwork of Russian realism that cuts to the heart of a nation torn between its slavish admiration for the West and the seductive pull of its own turbulent past. Set in the fashionable spa town of Baden-Baden, the novel chronicles the tumultuous inner journey of Grigory Litvinov, a young Russian landowner who arrives intending to marry his devoted fiancée, only to be ambushed by a consuming passion for Irina, the aristocratic woman who once broke his heart — and who threatens to do so again. With razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, Turgenev captures the hollow posturing of the Russian intelligentsia and aristocracy alike, rendering their endless political debates and social performances as insubstantial as the smoke of the title. Beyond its gripping romantic entanglement, Smoke stands as one of Turgenev's most politically daring works, a novel that scandalized both the radical left and the conservative right upon its publication and cemented its author's reputation as literature's most clear-eyed social anatomist. Turgenev's prose is characteristically elegant — lyrical yet precise, warm yet devastating — and his portraits of ideological posturing remain as bracingly relevant today as they were in Tsarist Russia. A novel that asks whether a man — or a nation — can ever truly escape its own illusions, Smoke leaves the reader with a question that lingers long after the final page.